Brief: If You Can’t Do It For Yourself…

I hope this post can help everybody but I think it may especially helpful for those that are socially avoidant, that may have problems to be emotionally really close to others.

In this short post we will discuss a method that allows a fast evaluation for your own current situation and what to do just in the next moment.

It is not necessarily a new idea and probably already has found application in different variations, e.g. software engineering there exists the concept of rubber duck debugging. However, I hope you still stay a while and listen.

The idea

The principle I want to present is as follows:

If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your future-selves.

Suddentruth

E.g., if you are going to write an exam next month and you need to learn for it, does the future-you care about whether you learn right now in this exact moment or not? You may think “If the future-me doesn’t care, why should I care right now?”. Well, the next step is to actually identify multiple future-you versions, not just the one that will write the exam. Imagine the future-you next week, in two weeks, three weeks and just before the exam. Maybe imagine the future you in five or ten minutes, in an hour, four hours or the tomorrow-you. Evaluate for each one how much they would appreciate it for you to learn right now.

After evaluating everyone, you will see that some care a lot and others don’t. You may even notice that your different future-you come up with different reasons why they would care or not or whether they need something else first.

Your future-you in ten minutes could tell you that they don’t see how they should have the resources to learn efficiently. Maybe you actually first need to satisfy hunger, thirst and tiredness. Try to really rest and not rest by scrolling through social media. Sometimes we forget that we can’t do things 100% of the time but that we also need phases to regenerate our resources so that we can finish bigger tasks.

Maybe you have identified another future-you that would really, really appreciate a certain action right now. This basically determines the prioritization of the different future-you. Yes, the future-you at the exam would appreciate it if you learned but it hopefully also has enough trust in you that you will somehow manage this requirement.

Once you identified the future-you that you want to achieve so that you can look back at the current-you and really appreciate yourself. Ask yourself what can you do to be aligned with the wish of this future-you.

In this example it means if your in ten minutes future-you would appreciate it if you regenerate your resources, try to listen to your body right now. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Are there maybe emotional experiences that you haven’t processed yet that will keep you distracted? Try to process them first.

The prioritization will show you your current unbalances, the things that most likely will distract you from your goal that’s further in the future.

But why should it work?

Yeah, why should it work? Well, often we are actually living so much in the current moment, if we have the freedom to do so, that we mostly will distract ourselves. Avoid everything that is uncomfortable in the moment right now. We avoid it, yes, but actually we often put it as additional burden on our back and carry it with us which just will slow us down. Time may passes by but we don’t evolve ourselves (what ever this means to each of you).

If you have children, you may will notice that you do a lot of things that you wouldn’t have done if they weren’t there. You keep working sleep-deprived, you go through all the emotions of your child together, you reevaluate your own fears because you don’t want to make your children fearful of the world but ready to fulfill all kind of dreams they want. And you will do all these kind of things for them without a second thought. (I know this is an imagine of an idealized family but you hopefully still get the point.) You are not getting paid for doing this stuff, you do it because you love your children. … so … maybe this method or idea is actually about practicing self-love. And maybe especially giving yourself the love that you didn’t receive from others for multiple, different reasons.

Of course, somebody could say that this is nothing else but building a good connection with your inner child (look up inner child concept if the reference is unclear). However, the inner child concept is often connected with the past, not the future… but maybe you are in this moment your “inner child of the past” for your “future-self”. Thinking like this hopefully enables you to be compassionate with yourself so that you don’t imagine your future-you as strict parent but as the compassionate-you that you may actually need for yourself.

In the end, doing things for others for free and establishing a good, healthy, loving relationship with them through these actions is maybe innate within ourselves. At least it helps to create your social group.

Risks and other thoughts

The problem is that if you are fueled with self-hate this method may be really difficult for you because the voices within yourself that judge yourself are already so strong so that this method may does not lead to self-compassion. Maybe for those people this method can help on a later part of their path?

The beautiful thing of this method is that it doesn’t depend on others. This means it does not require trust in others that could easily be broken but it really only does require yourself and I think this can be really helpful for many people that feel lost and depressed, disconnected from their environment.

I can even imagine that using this method can be quite a learning experience. What thoughts will run through your head when you have let a future-you down? Have you broken their trust? Do you think they are angry with you know? Are you trying to identify justifications to protect yourself against the accusations of your future-you? Or is your future-you compassionate with you? Does it try to understand how you feel about yourself? How will this inner dialog work out? How much is it influence by how you actually feel and what you were taught on the other side from your environment?

If you learn somehow to be compassionate towards yourself, you may also can become compassionate with others? Or maybe you are already so compassionate with others but actually you don’t let them anywhere near you? A question of trust and learned hurtful experiences? Like as if your compassionate-you isn’t the vulnerable-you?

This method may will require you to reevaluate your truths. Additionally, it will help you identify how much of a judgmental person you may are. And if you throw this method away, after the first time you failed to fulfill the requests of a future-you, this may actually also tells something about you.

Epilogue

One last problem I actually see is that the method requires self-reflection. People that require solutions on the outer world may won’t be able to work with this. But that’s okay, they may don’t even have the problem to act or of being stuck that much.

In the end this method helps to give the problems you face a structure. It may not be the right one for everybody but it helps to make use of the altruistic aspects within ourselves and make use of it for ourselves, even though that’s the opposite of the definition of altruism (I recommend looking up the definition of altruism here).
Through creating artificial versions of you, you can trick your tendency to altruism. This means your future-you versions become the social group your sacrifice yourself for (although it is not a sacrifice but a blessing because it is self-love).

Whether creating this artificial social group within yourself has any other positive or negative side effects needs to be evaluate and reflected on. However, I think it can be a stepping stone for some people to rebuild relationships with others and create therefore also outer social groups.

P.S.
You may don’t want to use this method 100% of the time, only when you are stuck, as the method itself can cost quite some energy.

I can imagine that the method is especially helpful for people that are addicted to whatever drug or behavior.

I am aware that the results heavily depend on your current environment. This post does not suggest that you are alone responsible for your luck and perception of life like ‘Law of attraction’ may suggests. This method is more of an example to continue into a certain direction if your environment variables and inner status variables match the requirements.

“Brief” posts are much shorter posts and don’t try to explain every thought but try to paint a picture.
They are statements and open questions to the reader and not discussions.
“Brief” is the German word for “letter” and English word for “short”. If you speak it out loud, you realize it sound phonetically identical to “breathe”. So, take these “Brief” posts as something to consume, reflect and relax. As a distraction from your daily life.