I’m kind of in a fog today, which I’m choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can’t be jet lag, because I didn’t change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I’m going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman.
In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur, he writes:
Here’s a question I like to ask people when I’m 5/8 drunk: Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen-year-old version of you. However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds. As such, there’s no way you will be able to explain who you are, where or when you’re calling from, or what any of this lunacy is supposed to signify. You will only be able to give the younger version of yourself a fleeting, abstract message of unclear origin.
What would you say to yourself during those fifteen seconds?
I’m not 5/8 drunk, but I’m probably only running at 37.5% efficiency, so I’ll throw this question out to my wise and worldly readers: What would you say to your past self, given those constraints?
It’s a tough question, particularly with fifteen as the target age. I turned fifteen at the end of ninth grade, and by that point, I had pretty much passed the worst problems of my adolescent years. The couple of years before that were pretty bad– seventh grade was particularly miserable– but by ninth grade, I had started to get things turned around, socially. I wasn’t entirely there, but by the end of ninth grade, I had mostly figured out where I fit, and that made my life in school vastly better than it was before.
So, while there are things I might like to change about the couple of years before that, by fifteen, there’s not that much I’d like to change that a fifteen-year-old me would have the power to change. I mean, I think the world would be a vastly better place had George W. Bush never been elected President, but there’s really not anything one slightly awkward teenager in central New York could do about that. And while it would’ve been nice to have information about which stocks to own in the mid-90’s, it’s not like I had access to enough money at that time to profit from the information.
As a result, the possible advice I could give myself is practically limited to things like “Don’t be such a dick to [some people you won’t meet for another four years or so].” Or possibly “Grab a spine and ask out [a person you won’t be interested in dating for another year or two].” Neither of which is likely to do much good.
Push it a couple of years earlier, and the message would be “The sooner you get over yourself, the sooner your life will improve.” Or even just “Hang in there; everything works out all right in the end.” Push it a couple of years later, and it would definitely be the “Grab a spine” one from the previous paragraph.
I’m curious to know what other people would choose, though. What fifteen-second message would you send yourself at fifteen?
“Hawk Wall Steet adjustable rate mortgage tranches, bail by August 2008, buy gold. Go expat, New Zealand south island.”
Pretty much all of the next-to-last paragraph is the message I wish I could make my teenager self believe. The problem is – I was a teenager, so I inherently wouldn’t believe it!
That or – “Your parents will be proud of you no matter what you do with yourself, stop trying to define yourself in opposition to them.” Another non-teenager-believable message.
Simple. I would tell myself, (and any teen today, too) “Ask the tough questions. And then ask, ‘How do you know that?’ Never accept, ‘That’s what everybody says,’ for an answer.”
A little bit more rebellion and skepticism would have been good for me, and it’s a message a teen would embrace.
“I can’t tell you who I am and I only have fifteen seconds. But I know you have an interest in Christianity. As a matter of personal courage and perspective, please, please read the works of Robert Green Ingersoll. You’ll be glad you di..” (dial tone)
Worth a try. Could have saved myself a lot of grief.
No fair! You didn’t answer the question yourself.
Me at 15?
“You’ll have about 9 serious relationships by the time you marry at 40, each one being healthier than the last.”
Or, if I had time to do some research, quote a couple lottery tickets–I might have risked $1 on the lottery on the advice of an anonymous cold call.
I wouldn’t bother.
I think Dave X has the right idea. The problem is, would your 15-year-old self trust a phone message from someone who refused to stay on the line for more than 15 seconds, who they don’t know? (Though, in my case, the voice would sound almost like my dad’s.) If your 15 second statement involves any specific information “don’t be a jerk to so-and-so” or “ask out what’s-her-name” it just makes it creepier. Now you have a stalker who is calling you up and telling you to do stuff! With the lottery ticket idea, there’s no way I’d really believe the anonymous phone call had any chance of being right, but maybe, I’d risk $1 just for kicks.
“Nothing you do can ever gain you Mom’s approval; stop wasting time trying. Spend more time with Dad; he’ll be gone all too soon.”
“Lose weight or die trying. Double in computer science. Amazon, Google, and gold.”
There’s actually much more critical and useful information, but even if I believed it I wouldn’t have had the strength of character to make use of it. Like, “Don’t be a dick,” and “stop assuming everyone else is stupid.”
(And Amazon and Google both came around late enough that people in grad school were putting money on Amazon. If I’d had enough brains to put even a hundred bucks down on Amazon near the IPO– as one of my classmates did– it would be some tidy cash, now.)
I won’t post my answer, but I’ve got advice about your introductory remark about jet lag.
Jet lag has as much to do with dehydration as it does with time zones (and then only when shifting several time zones to the east, not shifting 2 or 3 to the west, since we adjust quickly to the latter case). Airplanes are desert dry inside (the air coming in is cold and dry), so you can easily get a dehydration headache or general sense of fatigue just because you didn’t drink enough water, or you made it worse by drinking beer or coffee.
Buy the damn gold, don’t let dad talk you out of it. oh, and APPLE, MICROSOFT, INTEL . when you’re ready to diversify.
“Don’t take the brown acid! Also, invest in Apple and Google stock.”
“You won’t listen to this, because I remember hearing this at 15 and not acting upon it. There is no free will, and the future is already written; that doesn’t give you an excuse to loaf. Work hard, be frugal, diligent, and caring, and people will reciprocate. END OF LINE”
“Buy real estate in the late 1990s, and sell it all by 2007.”
As for the jet lag issue: CCPhysicist is mostly right, but you can also throw your schedule out of whack by taking the 6:00 AM flight when you normally aren’t up before 7:00. That will leave me jet lagged even when I am flying west. Ditto the overnight flight: I felt just as jet lagged coming back from Brazil (Manaus is one hour ahead of EST) as when I have done red-eye and Europe flights. Drink lots of liquids that don’t contain caffeine or alcohol, and take it as easy as you can in the connecting airport (you must have changed planes to get between ALB and whatever airport serves the Perimeter Institute).
I’d have to come up with some amalgam of:
“Starve yourself, life will be better that way”
“Expend effort in math class”
“DONT PLAY MEDIEVIA”
and possibly some financial advice as noted above, but I’d be scared that would drive me away from a science career :p
“Eat less, walk more, and for the love of all things good, don’t date Freshmen. Oh, and go play some baseball with your friends instead of EverQuest alone.”
“You will be okay. Get help for yourself. You will meet your love soon. And, by golly, start writing. Write anything. Burn it later if you need to but write now.”
Hrm. Fifteen seconds. To me at fifteen.
However dark it seems now, it will get better, so don’t do too much damage.
Things will get worse. They sure as hell will get better, so stick around and see how.
Either:
“It’s OK to be gay, and college will teach you how to come out.”
Or:
“There is no God. Teach yourself why, and learn how to debate.”
I did try to e-mail this to my fifteen year-old self about seven years back, but couldn’t find the right header for time travel:
There will come a time in your life where you will be in grad school, and at a bar, and be introduced to a nice, quite attractive graduate student from France. At this moment in your life, it would behoove you to know some fucking French. Thus you may want to start paying attention in class. Thank you.
P.S.: Ask some girls out, for crying out loud.
Now, seven years removed from the grad school bar scene, my advice would just be the postscript, with the additional advice to “Go out for cross-country, you’ll like it,” and “Get over yourself and try more things.” And if I get an extra fifteen seconds, “That series of books you’re about to start is never going to end. Just letting you know.”
“That series of books you’re about to start is never going to end. Just letting you know.”
A-ha. That made me laugh out loud.
“This is your future self. Buy Apple stock now, sell January 2008. Your current email password is **** and you have a crush on ****”
A short story on a very similar theme: http://ficly.com/stories/3639
To which I wrote a sequel at http://ficly.com/stories/4351
“Don’t bother pursuing the girl called ****** you’ll meet in ****** in a few years. She’ll just string you along for years, but isn’t actually interested in guys. It would break your heart. Buy real estate, sell in early 2007 and shift to gold.”
First I have to get my attention by telling myself something impossible to predict, so the first line would be “The scores in the next cricket match will be …..” Then improve my life at 15 “Don’t be so sure, your opinions will change. Take what other people say seriously. Do a bit more to help. Laugh more. Some girls like you, so ask them out.” Next improve my later life “Put a bit more effort in and you’ll get more reward.” And finally, if there is time, something like the name of a horse which wins a future race, which would be easier to remember than the lottery numbers.
I might need 20 second for that lot, even speaking quickly.
My first thoughts were to:
*tell myself to talk to that girl two benches forward in my Monday morning lectures when I reach 21. But she’s my wife now, and much as I would like to have known her two years earlier, I’d be terrified of screwing it up.
*make myself rich (lottery, stock market, horse racing) by giving a series of tips (15 year old me would never gamble like that without the first tip coming true first). Similar to the first, I’d be afraid of the course of my life changing enough that I don’t end up with her.
Maybe if I had the time to dig them up, I could give lottery numbers (football results, etc..) for 1 draw shortly after the call (or some other evidence of future knowledge) and then some 10 years down the line. That might work.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I think I’d do nothing. I’m very happy with my life right now. Money is my only concern (and being broke is ok when you’ve got everything else), and I wouldn’t risk interfering with that.
Girl X is not really your friend stay away from her and make different friends. Q, R, and S are going to be really interesting when you grow up, make friends with them instead.
Like some of these later respondents, I worry a bit that any wisdom I give my future self would improve my career or wealth or whatever, but then I would not meet my wife. I had a chance at a one-year job at Cambridge but turned it down for a tenure-track job in Minnesota that turned out to be hellish. If I take Cambridge, my career is a gazillion times better and I’m at a place people have heard of. But then I don’t meet my wife. Same with buy low/sell early on tech stocks or real estate – if I get rich, the need to polish off the dissertation or the urgency to get a job (lacking the financial resources to have the patience to take the right job) wanes, I do not end up in West Texas, and I never meet my wife.
So, something like: Be less cocky, more truly confident; love yourself less and like yourself better; don’t only do things you’re good at; The Red Sox will finally win it all in your lifetime, hell, even the Pats will. Finally: All regrets don’t always end up being regrets.
dcat
“The time to quit being so lazy is NOW, go for biochemistry, you’ll understand why once you get into it. And don’t go to Oberlin! But buy the IBM stock as soon as you get that chance.”
Then I might have the next few seconds to argue with me, as I as a 15-yr-old would be all over the arguments.
Any change you’d make would quickly spiral into unpredictable territory (see chaos); all you’d end up doing is creating an alternate universe for someone who was once like you to live in. For example, even if he went on to meet that universe’s version of my wife, they’d never have the same children we have.
So, what to say? Lotto numbers and stock tips are probably useless – for the very same reason of chaos. Very general trends might work – but the timing of real estate bubbles and such would probably be variable.
In the end, I think you’d just have to give general life advice… and fifteen-year-olds get plenty of that anyway, and make use of so little. “Skip engineering, go straight into computer programming; it’s what you’ll end up doing anyway and you’ll enjoy it. Good money, too, but don’t rely on stock options. Keep up with the exercise, and don’t fret about asking girls out – almost every guy has only a 10% success rate.”
That’s only twelve seconds there. What could I squeeze in the last three? Hmm… maybe I could start Linux a couple years early…. :->
I’d probably give myself some explicit investment advice. Perhaps, buy Prime, ignore the warrants, or perhaps, buy Apple when Steve Jobs returns. I’d tell myself to write it down. I kept all my old notebooks. With only 15 seconds I’d have to pick a few stocks and a few dates to transmit, so it would be worth doing a little research before the call. (I followed the market back in high school. It was one of the few things I shared with my parents who were big Wall Street Week fans.)
Most of the other advice, I had sort of figured out by 15, though some goals required more patience than others.