Dear Future Me

Dear Future Me,

Have you moved house yet away from that alcoholic, noisy neighbour? Did you get a better car? Is it black? You want a black one right now. Did you find enlightenment or find yourself in those therapy sessions? Did you lose some weight? I bloody hope you did 'coz you're a year on from then and you could have lost 30 kilo's by now if you'd gone to the gym every day. If you did, then well done and keep up the good work... if not... get to it!

About three years ago I discovered a great site called FutureMe from which you can e-mail yourself (or someone else) in the future. The system delays sending the e-mail until the date you specify. I always forget all about it until I am surprised by a message in my inbox from myself a year ago.

It's strangely difficult to write to yourself as though you're someone else. However, receiving the mail is really great if you can smile at the positive changes the past year has brought. It's less fun though if the lack of change in your life makes you frown a little and almost embarrassedly close the e-mail as fast as possible.

Although I unoriginally send one e-mail a year ahead (thinking that it's easy to overkill such a concept), you can delay the e-mail for a longer or shorter period of time as you wish. There are some people that send messages ten years into the future but I'm a cynic and doubt that the site itself will still exist in ten years - or my e-mail address for that matter. So I stick to a year.

You can chose to keep your message private or make it public anonymously. It is with a selection of those public letters that the makers of the site are compiling a book which can already be pre-ordered from Amazon.