1

Idling away an afternoon someone may mention playing a game of ‘what-if’. One can learn things from what-if thought experiments if one is a bit careful about it. In this case it is the intriguing thought experiment to speculate on what your older self would say to your younger self if they met. In particular, what advice the older self would give to the younger. But wait, one may object, surely it may be the younger self giving advice to the older self. What would the younger self say to the older? To set it up as a one-way process, old to young, makes an assumption: that the younger self would not be in a position to give advice to the older self. We will see that it may go both ways.

A proper consideration of this includes such matters as learned-from experience, the self and identity, and personal integrity.

Let us stipulate what we mean by youth and age here. I shall just fiat that by youth I envision someone in their twenties and by age I mean anyone over sixty. One can fiddle about with the years and bands of years as much as one likes, it will not change anything fundamental about what may be said. I should say that I am excluding children, anyone under eighteen, from this, and am concerned only with adults.

2

The main trend in the imagined conversation between the older and younger self is that the older self offers guidance, or even warnings, to the younger self so as to avoid mistakes they, the older self, have made through their experience of life. On the face of it this seems obvious; but on another look it may be seen as not as simple as that. Even on its own plain-face terms one issue is that it opens up a dizzying array of multiple branching futures, possibilities and roads not taken, but that might have been if things and one’s decisions had been different. These are sometimes called counterfactuals, that is, what might have happened if things had been different, counter to the facts. Such as, what the history of the world would be if Hitler or Stalin had not been born or had been killed. For example, say one decided not to marry someone one might have married, and there were good reasons at the time – reasons one might give as advice to one’s younger self – so one goes on to marry someone else. But does that mean the marriage that did happen was better than the one decided against? Or perhaps the consequence of not marrying the first person means that it turns out one ends up marrying many times, or perhaps not at all. If one has chosen the first person to marry one would have had children, but in the case of the second none. Is this better or worse for the life one lives? There is no way to tell. So it would be hard to know what advice to give. Even deciding where to live has ramifications that are beyond calculation; the people one meets, the people one does not meet, the places one might as a consequence have gone and did not go, which itself will have more of the same sorts of consequences, all unknowable. So saying to your younger self that you should or should not do something explodes an expanding mass of branching spreading tentacles marking out different possible futures, whose course and destination is utterly unknowable. Does this mean that the older self cannot give advice to the younger self? No, but one should be wary of being too confident about where taking the advice might lead or have led. And in giving the advice one should make that clear to the recipient of it.

3

Another matter is who the older self is that is giving the advice. A lot of people, as they get older, that is, become old by the usual standard measure, do not think they have really changed – they appear changed and are looked upon as such to varying degrees by others, but as people tend to say, ‘inside’ they just feel the same as when they were young. Of course there are things about them they know have changed, not only matters of appearance, but also of health (acute conditions and gradually falling apart) and energy, and such like. They may even have changed mentally in some ways, perhaps they are now untroubled by ambition, or they are calmer or indeed more anxious and less calm. The changes may exaggerate traits already present. But they may say they are essentially the same person. By this they tend to mean their sensibilities, what they like and do not like, their feeling and values, the things that they see as making them who they are have not changed. The colour and tone may have shifted, but the content has remained at its core is the same. Not everyone views themselves like this; some feel and emphasize that ‘people change’. I suspect that this, the changeability of people, can be exaggerated, a confusion of the superficial and the deeper features of someone. Perhaps we must allow for some outlier cases of people who undergo traumatic events to be significantly changed, along with the effect of the wear and tear of ageing on us affecting how we view ourselves; but even here I would prefer to view it as bashes and dints, and rusted bearings, of the same ‘car’ of the self, rather than an utterly altered transmogrification into a different kind of self.

What age can try to convey to one’s younger self is not only the accumulations of experience that cannot come other than with time passing, but also the perspective and feelings of that perspective that occur simply because one has reached a greater age. Less in front and more behind, and one has to add the added pressure of thoughts of death, of the end. But in between there are also other staging posts in one’s life which make one realize in ways that are not apparent earlier that certain things are never going to happen now. Becoming a parent or getting to the point where one knows one will not be a parent has such deep significance and changes one’s life. But other things become closed off, whereas in youth one has, other things being equal, one’s whole life before one. One might then suggest to the youthful that they choose carefully, for not only will some choices be better than others, some wrong and some right, but they will be become irreversible. One might say, think of who you are and what you really want, not necessarily what others expect. One might also think that youth is loath to listen simply because of where they are, and being like you aged is virtually unthinkable to them, and in any case so far off as to be not worth thinking about much, if at all, until suddenly, and it can seem that way, you are older and old.

4

This brings us to an important and overlooked point as to who advises whom. There is a sense in which people say that in their youth, after the searching about – full of false starts and dead ends – of childhood, one gets to a point, often around one’s mid-twenties, when one determines or finds out who one is, one’s true self. And that this is the self that will remain with you all your life. Whatever happens to you. One can hope that it is a self one likes and can be proud of. A malleability of self tends to be lost after that. And the use of the word ‘true’ here, with its normative and not just factual connotations, supports the idea that such a self has a value. Now consider the older self – although at bottom one remains the same self, it is possible also to lose sight of that self, to lose oneself. The effects of the world buffet one this way and that – circumstances and institutions lead one into compromising one’s values, to even erode one’s personal integrity. Perhaps as a younger person one said to oneself that one would never do a certain job because one thought it pointless, or boring, or damaging, but the older self finds itself doing it. Perhaps one remains silent in later life where one would once would have spoken out honestly and still should in a certain direct way. When younger one might have had a great love of reading or music, writing or painting, but later one neglects this and comes to regret not keeping it up. In one’s older self one’s youthful self is still there, but one has lost the perspective on oneself to see it clearly, to remember what it was one really valued, what one’s true sensibilities are and what one thought worth holding on to. It is at this point that in the thought experiment the youthful self could offer advice to the older self: do not let your true self be submerged. This is not news the older self may want to hear; it, the older self, may be incredulous, laughing it off, or even insulted, thinking as it may, and as anyone would like to think, that one has not lost sight of the best of oneself, of one’s real self, rather than thinking that something is obscuring it with layers upon layers of extraneous adjuncts so that it is hard to see that there is even a question to be taken seriously about one’s self being lost. But it may have been. Quite likely so except for those with great self-awareness. And of this the youthful self can remind the older self and hope to be heard. For in having a core self we have hopefully built something that is not utterly plastic that can stand with good values against the vagaries and pressure of circumstances, someone whose values hang together as a coherent whole, someone who has integrity. Indeed, we need not even engage in a fanciful thought experiment here; people who are our old friends, have known us since our youth, will notice if we start to act against the way the person they always thought we were would, that is to say, out of character – perhaps we now appear stuffy, unable to laugh on the grounds of improperness at things that one once found hilarious – one can hope that our friends may say something if that former youthful self was something to be proud of and of value. Friends may say: ‘What the hell has happened to you, you never used to be like this?’ as an alarm for us to take heed of. Even if it is not wholly a fine youthful self, at least it is who one truly is and not something false. One’s youthful self can ground one’s later self, reminding you of who you really are and not to lose it and move too far away to a false and inauthentic self, and so that then one may learn not to betray one’s youthful essential self: a certain personal honesty, to oneself and to others, that we can tend to lose as we get older – though we do not like admitting it.

5

What conclusions may we draw? One thing to notice is that the relationship between youth and age is not symmetrical. Age cannot literally give advice to one’s youth. Though it still may be possible to learn something valuable about oneself as an aged person as revealed by the advice one would give to one’s younger self. Youth can in a sense give advice to one’s older self for we can access our earlier self through our memory and other evidence of what we were like then. This memory may not be fully accurate; but still some substantial if not literal communication between youth and age is possible. Of course, there is a subtle question of what the older self that looks back on the younger self is like. It may not be the kind of older self overlaid as it is by the nature and experience of the intervening years that welcomes confronting a younger self, or if it does it may hide the truth about its younger self because not to do so would be to confront one’s faults and mistakes, the very things one’s younger self might point out.

So the advice and guidance youth and age in a single person can give to each other is both mutual and different. Both the younger self can learn from the older and the older self learn from the younger, but in rather different ways overall. The older self learns from experience and passes that back to the younger, whereas the younger self may remind the older who it essentially is and why that matters.