The selves we carry
THE RUB
The clock is ticking. I’m 57 years old, and I have fewer days ahead of me than I’ve already lived. Some people find that morbid. I find it clarifying. It affects how I look at ambition, regret, and what I still have time to become.
When I was 16, I took my first ride in a single-engine prop plane. I loved it! I wanted to be a pilot. In my 20s, I earned my private license and dreamed of owing my own plane, loading up the family, and skipping the terminals altogether. But flying is expensive and time consuming. Kids arrived. Life redirected. I let my currency lapse, and I haven’t piloted in over twenty years. That dream quietly closed.
When I completed a few ultramarathons, I imagined myself as one of those ageless runners you see at hundred-milers, still at it in their 70s and 80s, finishing what most people won’t start. The reality is more complicated. I’ve completed three hundreds. I’ve also DNF’d five. And lately, watching my parents navigate their seventies, I’m asking myself questions I used to brush aside: What does health look like for me at 75? What am I doing now that either helps or hurts that answer?
I’m an optimist, and I genuinely believe tomorrow will be better than today. But not all my hopes come into reality, and I recently learned a framework that refined how I think about my future.
THE FRAMEWORK
In The Other Side of Change, Maya Shankar takes scholarly psychology and makes it usable. One concept she draws on is possible selves, introduced by Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Nurius. We carry multiple versions of our future selves:
Hoped-for selves reflect our aspirations. The pilot. The ultrarunner who finishes Western States at 72. The writer who publishes the book.
Feared selves embody our worries. The person who loses their health the way a parent did. The one who never took the leap and wonders, at the end, what would have happened.
Expected selves are the versions we actually predict for ourselves. Not the dream, not the nightmare, the working forecast. What we genuinely think is coming.
The challenge is to raise our aspirations and expand what’s possible. Labeling our thoughts and concerns can help bust through constrains of worry and unfounded assumptions, and focusing on real life examples of greater aspirations can lead to a better future self. So how do we do that?
THE PRACTICE
Shankar provides a method by introducing us to another psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who defines a process for lifting our future selves with moral elevation. It’s that inspired feeling you get when you witness someone’s moral beauty. An act of courage. A quiet sacrifice. A person behaving with a depth of character that catches you off guard and compels you to rise to meet it.
You can’t engineer those moments. You can’t schedule moral elevation for Tuesday at 3 pm. But you can create conditions to make them more likely to appear. Shankar offers three pathways that I’m planning to explore:
Read fiction. Stories introduce you to lives different from your own and asks you to inhabit them for a while. That exercise stretches what you can imagine for yourself. In The Hedge Knight by George R. R. Martin, Ser Duncan the Tall showed me how to weigh a decision not just by what it might bring, but by what it costs. His squire Egg showed me that actions speak with greater power than words.
Deliberately cross fields. Ideas from evolutionary biology, architecture, music theory, or philosophy rewire how you see the problems you are facing. I devoured the Acquired podcast’s Formula 1 episode. It’s an amazing story about a sport that spent decades building infrastructure and patience before it became a global phenomenon which reframed how I think about long-term plays in my own life.
Identify transferable skills. What you know doesn’t just belong to the context where you learned it. I’ve spent years building trust in rooms where change feels threatening, developing people who didn’t know what they were capable of, communicating in ways that move people rather than just inform them. Those skills are portable to many future selves.
I’m working to use my hoped-for selves to lift my options, use my feared selves to motivate me, and my expected selves to deliver better days ahead.
I’m not going to back to flying. Some doors close, and that’s just the truth of a finite life. But there are doors I haven’t opened yet, and at 57, I have more clarity about time than I had at 37. It’s an imperative to move with intention. Speaking of that, time for me to lace up and go for a run.