Some late nights I sit down to write for someone I’ll never meet. My future self, the one reading this years from now, wondering what I was thinking.
Most of our work is like this. We labour for ghosts. The future version of ourselves who’ll benefit from the pension we’re paying into. The children we might have. The reputation we’re building. The legacy we hope to leave.
It’s an odd form of faith. We sacrifice present comfort for hypothetical future reward, trusting that the person we’ll become will appreciate what we did for them today.
Heidegger called this “being-towards-death.” We live in constant awareness of our future nonexistence, and it shapes every present choice. We are always working for someone we’re becoming but will never quite reach: the person we’ll be tomorrow, next year, at the end.
My uncle spent thirty years at a job he found moderately soul-crushing, in service of a retirement he was too ill to enjoy. He died eight months after leaving work. I think about this more than I’d like to.
Was it wasted? All that deferred living, all that sacrifice for a future that never arrived?
The Buddhists would say yes. They’d point to the trap of always living ahead of yourself, never quite inhabiting the present because you’re too busy preparing for what comes next.
But there’s something deeply human in it too. Something almost noble. We plant trees we’ll never sit under. We write books that might outlive us. We build things knowing they’ll be enjoyed, if at all, by people we’ll never know.
Perhaps the question isn’t whether your future self will appreciate your present labour. Perhaps it’s whether you can find meaning in the labour itself, regardless of outcome.
I think about my uncle differently now. Maybe he wasn’t wasting his life in service of a retirement that never came. Maybe the point was the act of provision itself. The daily choice to show up, to be reliable, to make something sustainable.
The future self we work for is a fiction anyway. I am not the person I was planning for ten years ago. I don’t want most of the things I was supposedly building towards. That person’s priorities seem alien to me now.
And yet, I’m grateful he did the work. I’m living in a life he constructed without knowing who I’d become. He built something stable enough that I could afford to change.
This is the paradox: we work for people we’ll never become, and somehow it still matters. The future self who receives your labour isn’t the same person who performed it. But the act of provision, the gesture towards continuity, creates something more than its outcome.
Some late nights I sit down to write for someone I’ll never meet. Maybe he’ll read this and understand. Maybe he’ll wonder why I bothered. Either way, the work gets done.
We are all labouring for ghosts, building futures we can’t quite imagine, trusting that the act of building means something even when the blueprint proves wrong.