A letter from March 5th, 2016

Dear FutureMe, Hey man, I hope life is going well for you. It ******* better be cuz I'm working my *** off for you :L Or at least I like to tell myself I am. I was just about to write a journal entry in Evernote and accidentally typed in 05/03/26 instead of 05/03/16. Made me wonder about the future for just a moment. Wonder what it's gonna be like. Who am I gonna be? How will the world have changed? So then I decided to write this. It's been in my bookmarks for a while, and I've been putting off writing this. And now, when I have other more urgent things to be doing, I decide to write it. Like a true procrastinator. Right now as I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the Starbucks on Stephens Green. I'm listening to Kendrick Lamar's Untitled Unmastered EP. I'm a little bit stressed and on edge. Had a mini freak out a second ago cuz I thought I lost my phone. Left my key in the door this morning and Laurie was kinda pissed off. Starbucks Wifi is being super dodgy which always gets me way too pissed off. Also my back hurts a bit. Okay I've calmed down now, all is good. I suppose I'll give you a snapshot of where I'm at right now. I'm 21 years old. I started working at my first programming job two months ago. I just moved in with Laurie and Shane a week ago. I'm enjoying life right now. More so than any time in the last year and a half. The last year and a half has seemed like a lifetime. Probably doesn't seem that long to you though :L If the last 10 years is anything to go by, the person I'm talking to in this email will be almost unrecognisable to the one writing it. A completely different person. Of course I won't change anywhere near as much in the next 10 years as I have through ******* and adolescence, but I hope it will be a pretty drastic difference all the same. In hindsight, I can see that I was pretty ******* stupid at almost every point in my life. I made a lot of ****** decisions, and failed to make a lot of good ones. Which makes me reluctant to say anything about what my plans/hopes/opinions are right now. Because you're looking back at me from 10 years in the future and are probably gonna think I'm a ******* idiot haha Of course I'm sure you already think I'm an idiot. It would be a bit worrying if you didn't. So here I go. Right now I'm doing an internship as part of the course in Dublin. I'm in third year. I really dislike College. I really like the internship though. So I'm really dreading going back. So I've got a plan. My plan goes like this. There's 5 ways it could turn out. Scenario 1: Work really hard for the duration of the internship. Get a job at an awesome company. Drop out of College and start building up a career and a life from there. Scenario 2: Work really hard for the duration of the internship. Get a job at an awesome company. Take a year out from College to work. Do College work while on the year out. After the year out, successfully ask work for a more flexible schedule. This allows me to stay at the job and finish the degree at the same time. So basically I do final year over the space of two years so I don't have to move back to Galway. Scenario 3: Work really hard for the duration of the internship. Get a job at Intercom or another awesome company. Take a year out from College to work. Do College work while on the year out. After the year out, unsuccessfully ask work for a more flexible schedule. Go back to College with much of the work done, making it much more easy and bearable. Try to make the most of it. Maybe focus attention on making a kickass final year project. Scenario 4: Same as above, except instead of having most work for the year finished before starting 4th year, I have very little done (due to laziness or whatever). So 4th year is as bad as I thought it would be, except now most of my friends have graduated, so I have to do the whole thing with the added challenge of being more lonely. Try to make the most of it. Scenario 5: Work really hard for duration of the internship. Fail to get a job at an awesome company. Go back to College and finish the course. Try to make the most of it. None of them are ideal. Scenario 1 was my best case scenario up until a few days ago. Now it's Scenario 2. Scenario 1 isn't really part of the equation any more. I would like to work in America at some point so I kinda need a degree. Scenario 4 is obviously worst case. Problem is, by attempting my best case (Scenario 2) I risk ending up with my worst case (Scenario 4). I'm still gonna go for it though. You're probably aware of some obvious flaws in this plan due to your powers of hindsight, but I think it's pretty good so screw you. I'm not sure if this is actually interesting to you, as you already know what happens. But writing it has kinda straightened things out in my head. Regardless of which ends up happening, they all start the same way: Work really hard for duration of the internship. This is going surprisingly well. Right now, I'm trying to build up a really solid daily routine. So I'll tell you about that. It's going pretty well. I'm getting quite a lot done. On the way to work, I read. I have been able to read a book a week since the first of January doing this. At work, I'm trying to learn as much as I can. It could be going a lot better, but I'm pleased with how I've done so far. This is my first programming job, so I've got a ******** to learn. I'll forgive myself for being **** right now. The thing I need to work on most is to ask more questions. Also spend less time dossing. On the way back from work, I'm learning German with the Duolingo app. It's going very well. I'm enjoying it a lot. After work hasn't been going as well as it could. There's been a lot of browsing reddit. The idea is to go to the gym straight after work and then work on learning Android development. I'm four chapters into an Android book so it's going okay. I'll get better over the next few weeks in this area. As I said, Things are going pretty well in general. My depression is almost completely gone because of the meds. I'm not super happy about being reliant on medication though. My plan here is to start getting Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and work my way up to a point where I think I can go without them. I think I can do this within the next year if everything goes well. Three years at the most. The social anxiety is still there mostly. I'm working on it though and it is getting better. Things are definitely on the up. That's my life right now. That's PresentMe and all his hopes and dreams. I'm still in Starbucks btw, and there's a very strange interaction going on beside me. There's a guy and a girl. The girl is going to be in a music video, and the guy is explaining the details of the job. Basically explaining the various ways she's going to have to expose herself haha. They just started discussing what underwear she's gonna be wearing. These people literally just met haha. Anyways. Now I turn my attention to the future. To you. All I can say about you is that I haven't a ******* notion of anything about you. Where you are. What you are doing. How you earn your money. Who you spend your time with. Are you married? Do you have Kids? Who the **** wins the US elections? Right now it seems like it's between Hillary, Trump, and Sanders. Not that I know anything about politics. I'd like Sanders to win. Trump is too crazy and Hillary is too boring/fake. I would also really like to see Trump win though cuz he's a ******* lunatic, and that would be interesting to see. Have driver-less cars taken everybody's jobs yet? That's gonna be messy :( What's the third season of Rick and Morty like? Well I already know it's going to be amazing. I'm very jealous that you've already seen it. No spoilers! I really can't wait to see what Elon Musk achieves in the next ten years. Does the Model 3 Tesla become huge? Do electric cars start taking over form petrol cars? I really hope they do. Has he put people on Mars yet? Has space exploration become a big thing again? He just recently landed a first stage rocket for the first time (for a LEO launch). He had a launch yesterday. Watched it this morning. First attempt at landing the first stage of a geostationary satellite. It blew up :/ Also I'm super excited to find out what everybody gets up to. Most of all Jacob. You guys better still be the best of friends. If not then go hang out with him. I order you. Also Sean. Go hang out with too. What about Oisin and David? I'm sure they're both millionaires by now :L There's a lot of talk about AI right now. I'm guessing there still is in 2026. A lot of really smart people seem to be worried about it. It doesn't worry me much. Probably cuz I don't know much about it. So I hope computers have not ****** off all the humans. If they have then....sorry? I also hope your not dead obviously. That would not be ideal. There's a reasonable chance that someone close to you has died. I haven't experienced this yet. If they have, then just allow yourself to be sad for as long as it takes, but no longer. Get on with your life. On a lighter note, if everything doesn't go according to plan, don't worry. I understand. Life is hard man. I know I have very high expectations of you, and can be very demanding of you. I'm like your Asian Parent haha But if you don't achieve great things with your life, then that's cool. As long as you're giving it a shot, that's cool with me. If, on the other hand, you get lazy and settle for a life of mediocrity because it is the easier option, then **** you. I thought you were cool man. ..I've kinda run out of things to say. I'm not sure what you want here. What would I want to read from a past version of myself? Probably just more **** about what I'm up to and what goes on in my head. Okay. I've been pretty lost as to what to do with my life, but I think I've settled on programming for the next few years at least. I really enjoy most aspects of it and people are willing to pay me for it, so it seems like a pretty good place to start. I'd also love to be a writer, despite the fact that I have no writing experience, am not very good at it, and I almost never write anything :L But I enjoy doing it when I do. People are not willing to pay me for it right now though, so I'll have to develop it as a hobby. Hopefully you're reading this cringing at how bad the writing is haha I haven't really thought a lot about what I'll do after I finish College. I'd like to move to Berlin, New York, SF, LA. Maybe even London. A big city with a good startup scene basically. I also really want to Travel. I always get itchy feet at this time of year, and for once I've actually got some money. I'm thinking of going to Berlin for a couple of weeks in the Summer. Practice my German. If I could get a job where I work remotely, then I could travel all the time. That would be sweet. And not that unlikely. Maybe you're doing it right now! When I think of being 31 it seems like so far away, but I'm sure it will creep up on me. I probably don't seem as distant to you as you do to me. At 31 you've still got a lot of living to do. I can't really imagine what your worries and troubles are. Probably something about being overrun with too much clunge right? But I'm pretty confident things will be going at least reasonably well for you. I'm really giving it my best right now, so I trust that things will work out. I'm getting quite tired now so I'm gonna wrap this up. This took waaay longer than I thought it would. It's half eight on a Saturday night. I'm going to go home, get food and go to sleep. I was out last night so I feel like a zombie. Hopefully you've stopped drinking. It probably isn't doing us any favours like. So that's it FutureMe! You can you back to back to entertaining bikini babes in your electric sports car now (or whatever it is you were doing). With Love, You