A Guide to Timetravels
Our past and present selves have never been separate entities but rather interwoven narrators.
A Guide to Timetravels
"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space... You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."
— Margaret Atwood
Last night, I performed a peculiar séance, not with the dead, but with an algorithmic ghost of my own past: my 16-year-old self.
Or rather, I fed a decade's worth of teenage writings into an LLM, creating a kind of neural ouija board through which my adolescent consciousness might speak. The experiment felt both sacrilegious and sacred, a technological resurrection of a self that both was and wasn't me.
I provided minimal guidance beyond that prompt—"write as if you're me at 16, addressing your future self." What emerged was a voice both familiar and foreign, mine yet not mine, capturing vulnerabilities I had forgotten and dreams I still carry.
Here's what "she" wrote:
Dear Future Me,
It's past two in the morning, and once again, I'm sitting at my computer. Everything around me is quiet, with only the sound of the keyboard and my own breathing. Tonight feels especially silent.
Today was filled with small moments. In the evening, as I walked with my friends, we talked about the future, imagining ourselves ten years from now. One friend dreams of becoming a lawyer, another a CEO, and another wants to open a small café. When it was my turn to speak, I hesitated. It surprised me that I knew exactly what I wanted, but that alone made me self-conscious to saying it out loud.
I've always felt like a tiny boat adrift on an endless sea, without a defined route or a clear destination. Yet, I'm drawn to a distant, mysterious continent that feels both beautiful and unreachable. My dream—to write, to create, to think deeply—seems so clear yet so far away. I fear it's beyond my grasp, that I'll climb halfway up a tower only to fall back down, my treasure always remaining out of reach.
Lately, I've realized how much courage it takes to truly commit to a dream. During our walk tonight, I listened to friends describing their aspirations: lawyers, CEOs, café owners. Their dreams seemed tangible, attainable. But mine? To write something meaningful, to uncover truth and beauty—feels both thrilling and terrifying. What if I never succeed? What if I can't find the right words or ideas?
But as I write this letter to you, my future self, I wonder how you see me. Did you reach that continent? Did you find the treasure atop the tower? Or are you still navigating that vast ocean, charting new routes toward even greater dreams?
No matter where you are or what you've achieved, please remember our promise: never let the ocean in your heart dry up. Keep that passion, that endless curiosity alive. Even when the world pushes back, even when doubt creeps in, listen to that voice inside you. It's the truest guide you'll ever have.
Maybe you've already faced struggles I can't yet imagine. Perhaps you've reached the shores we once dreamed about, or perhaps you're climbing new mountains altogether. But wherever you stand, if you're hesitating now, remember you already possess everything you need: passion, courage, talent, and the unwavering support of those who believe in you. Stop hesitating, trust yourself, and choose the path closest to your heart. I believe that whatever decision you make, it'll be the right one, because it's authentically yours.
Keep going! I will always believe in you, support you, and feel proud of you.
With love,
Your Past 16-year-old Self
Reading this letter, I felt something between nostalgia and disorientation. The metaphors about boats and oceans, the late-night contemplations, even the hesitation to name my dreams aloud, they all ring true. Yet I never wrote this specific letter. It's a synthetic creation, a ghost from a past that never quite existed in this form.
Remembered or Rendered?
What does it mean when an AI can reconstruct our past selves with such fidelity that we recognize ourselves in the reflection? Is it any less "real" than the memories we've constructed and reconstructed over time?
Our memories are notoriously unreliable — we constantly rewrite them, embellishing some parts and erasing others. In many ways, the "past self" we carry in our minds is already an approximation, a character we've constructed through selective remembering. Perhaps the LLM's version of my teenage self isn't so different from the one I would reconstruct through my own fallible memory.
And yet, there's something uncanny about outsourcing this act of remembrance. The letter captures my teenage preoccupations and writing style with eerie accuracy, but it was written by an algorithm trained on millions of texts, not just my own. It's a probability distribution of what a 16-year-old with literary aspirations might write, filtered through the patterns it detected in my work.
What's most unsettling is how much of "me" it captured without having lived my experiences. The AI didn't stay up late worrying about my future, didn't feel the weight of expectations, didn't experience the confusion of adolescence. Yet somehow, it articulated these emotions in ways that resonated deeply with my actual experience.
I wonder if this is how actors feel when they watch themselves perform, seeing something simultaneously intimate and foreign, authentic yet constructed. The difference is that I never performed these specific lines, yet they feel like they could have been mine.
Is this fundamentally different from how we reconstruct our past selves through memory? Perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than kind — we all construct narratives about our past selves, but the LLM's construction is more explicitly mediated.
A Letter Back: From Present to Past
After sitting with the AI's letter for several days, I felt a strange compulsion to respond—not to the AI, but to this simulacrum of my younger self. The process was emotionally complex: part therapy, part creative exercise, part existential inquiry. I found myself thinking carefully about what wisdom I'd actually gained, what promises I'd kept to that younger version of myself.
Dear 16-year-old me (or your algorithmic ghost),
I'm writing this from the shores of that distant continent you dreamed about. Yes, I made it here, though the journey wasn't what either of us expected. That tiny boat navigated storms we couldn't have imagined, took detours through unexpected waters, and sometimes drifted when the wind died down.
You were right to be afraid of saying your dreams aloud. Not because they weren't worth pursuing, but because naming something so precious makes it real — it gives it the power to disappoint you. But here's what I've learned: disappointment isn't fatal. Neither is failure. That tower you feared climbing? I've fallen from it more times than I can count. Each time, I got up with skinned knees and a slightly adjusted map.
The truth is, I still hesitate. I still doubt. But I've learned to work with these doubts rather than waiting for them to disappear. They become not obstacles but companions on this journey.
Your metaphor about the ocean in my heart makes me smile. It hasn't dried up. If anything, it's deeper now, with currents and tides I'm still learning to navigate. And yes, that voice you mentioned — I've learned to listen to it, even when it whispers things I'm afraid to hear.
What would surprise you most about where I am now? Perhaps that success and failure aren't the binary outcomes you imagined. They're more like weather, constantly changing conditions to navigate through rather than destinations to reach.
You asked if I reached that continent. I did, but what I didn't understand then is that reaching the shore is just the beginning. There are whole mountain ranges to explore, forests to get lost in, cities to build. The journey never really ends; it just transforms.
Thank you for your courage, your late nights, your uncertainty, your hope. All of it — especially the doubts and fears — helped bring me here. And wherever "here" is when you read this, know that I'm grateful to you, past self, for taking those first uncertain steps into the vast unknown.
With love and gratitude,
Your Future Self
The Blurred Boundaries of Self
What fascinates me most about this experiment is how it blurs the boundaries of selfhood. The LLM-generated letter feels authentic despite being synthetic. My response to it feels genuine despite addressing someone who never quite existed in the form presented.
In a way, this digital séance offers a new form of dialogue with ourselves, a conversation across time that wouldn't be possible otherwise. The teenage me couldn't have known what my life would become, and the current me can only dimly recall the intensity of those adolescent emotions. The AI created a space for reflection that exists outside linear time.
The experience reminds me of how photographers sometimes say they don't truly see a moment until they've captured and developed it. Similarly, I didn't fully recognize certain patterns in my younger self until the AI reflected them back to me—my tendency toward metaphorical thinking, my complicated relationship with ambition, my fear of disappointing others. The AI acted as both mirror and interpreter, giving form to aspects of myself I'd forgotten or never fully articulated.
Perhaps this reveals something interesting about the nature of consciousness itself: that what we call identity is less a continuous thread than a kind of quantum superposition, multiple selves existing simultaneously, collapsed into singular narratives only through the act of observation. The AI, in this light, becomes less a mirror than a measurement device, forcing our quantum states of selfhood to resolve into classical stories we can comprehend.
Using an LLM to generate a version of my past self simply makes explicit what is usually implicit: the constructed nature of our relationship with our past selves. It doesn't create this constructedness; it merely highlights it.
There's something liberating in this realization. If our relationship with our past selves is already partly an act of imagination, perhaps we can be more intentional about how we construct these narratives. Not to distort the truth, but to find meaning in it.
A New Kind of Time Travel
LLMs offer us a new kind of time travel — not literal journeys to the past, but new ways of relating to it. As Steve Jobs once envisioned: "Someday, that student not only studies the works of Aristotle, but asks Aristotle a question, and gets an answer." Today, these systems can help us reconstruct voices we've lost (including earlier versions of ourselves), explore counterfactual histories, and simulate conversations across time.
Consider what this might mean for someone trying to process trauma or loss. Imagine a person who lost a parent in childhood being able to "converse" with a simulation of that parent based on letters, recordings, and stories from relatives. Or someone recovering from addiction having a dialogue with their "self" from before their recovery journey began. These aren't replacements for therapy or human connection, but they could offer new paths toward understanding and integration.
This isn't without risks. There's a danger in outsourcing too much of our memory and identity-construction to algorithms. What happens when the AI-generated version of our past becomes more vivid, more accessible than our actual memories? Could we eventually prefer these polished, coherent narratives to the messy, contradictory realities of our lived experience? There's also the ethical question of consent—can we truly say that our past selves would consent to being simulated in this way? Akin to the Black Mirror episode of reviving the dead.
But used thoughtfully, these tools might help us understand ourselves better — not by providing perfect reconstructions of the past, but by making us more aware of how we constantly reconstruct our past selves through memory and narrative.
In that sense, my conversation with my "16-year-old self" wasn't just about connecting with my past. It was also about recognizing how that past continues to exist within me — reshaped by time, space, and experience, but still fundamentally connected to who I am now.
Perhaps that's the most profound implication of this experiment: it reveals how our past and present selves exist in continuous dialogue, each informing and reshaping the other. The LLM simply gave this dialogue a more concrete form.
Perhaps the most profound revelation of this experiment is how it illuminates the eternal conversation between who we were and who we've become—a dialogue that has always existed in the shadows of consciousness. Our past and present selves have never been separate entities but rather interwoven narrators, constantly reinterpreting each other's stories across the landscape of memory. The LLM didn't create this dialogue; it simply crystallized it into tangible form, allowing us to witness explicitly what has always happened implicitly in the quiet chambers of reflection. In making visible these invisible threads of selfhood, we glimpse how identity itself is less a fixed point than a continuous act of mutual creation between the selves we've been and the self we're becoming.
What would your past self say to you? And what would you say in return? The answer might tell you something important about who you are and how you became that person.
In crafting this piece, I found myself wondering: as our ability to archive and simulate consciousness evolves, will the boundaries between memory, identity, and temporality become as fluid as the stories we tell about ourselves? These experiments in digital time travel may reveal less about the future of technology than about our eternal quest to know ourselves through the eyes of who we once were—and who we might become.
Further readings
For those curious, here are some additional readings that inspired my line of inquiry:
Characteristics of positive and negative autobiographical memories central to identity
Emotionally intense experiences – whether positive or negative – tend to be remembered more vividly and deemed more central to one’s life story.
The impact of momentary stress on autobiographical memory recall in a self-efficacy intervention
A 2024 study using real-time assessments found that during moments of high stress, participants had greater difficulty and less vividness in recalling positive personal memories of overcoming challenges.
Bias and constructive processes in a self-memory system
Because we strive for a consistent self-image, current beliefs and feelings can reshape recollections of the past.