Unsurprisingly Rishi Sunak was in the news again this week, although given the voting this weekend, it was likely his last hoorah for a while. Rishi survived the Adidas Samba furore, when he wrecked the image of Sambas for many by wearing them in a Downing Street interview to promote his tax policies. In a last minute election move, Rishi's party sent emails to constituents which purported to be from the future. Of course, no one believes the emails are from the future (or not many people do - it's amazing what people believe). However, it's an odd approach – emailing constituents with a standard missive which starts off:

"Hi Jane, you might be thinking of voting Labour, but actually I'm Jane from 2044 and I'd like to let you know that Labour have been in power ever since 2024 and it's been a really rough time." This email-from-the-future goes on to say Labour has rigged the electoral system and then the email blames Labour for an influx of immigrants and lack of jobs.

I have to admit I'm a little sceptical about whether this email story is true, because I can only find a single report on it, by Stuff. This worries me the same way the lack of photos of people in tinfoil hats worried me when New Zealand news hit the world stage in early 2022 about tinfoil hat wears at the Parliament protests. The article said a whole lot of batty protestors in Wellington believed they could fend off Government radio waves using tinfoil on their heads. I watched it go from local, to national, to international news over the course of a single day. I went looking for pictures of tinfoil hat wearers because i wondered how real this article was. I only found two images, both of the same group of six women, of whom five were wearing tin foil hats. This activity supposedly ran Wellington supermarkets out of tinfoil and there are only two pictures present on the internet? This has always seemed hard to believe.

Anyhow, Rishi's theoretical email campaign sent me off on an investigative trail that led to FutureMe. FutureMe is a service through which you can write a letter to your future self. Your letter is securely stored then automatically sent to you on a future date (the date having been requested by you when you lodged the email). You can send yourself a fan message, or a pep talk, record your memories, record goals so you can see if you have achieved those goals in the future...whatever you want.

Letters to a future self is an interesting idea – my main written documentation of the past is in diaries and I didn't normally write anything nice, or fun, or necessarily very interesting, in my diaries. Diaries were more about recording and analysing the minute, rather than tailoring text for future me. Would I benefit from having written myself a nice letter that could arrive in my inbox along with the other 102 emails for that day?

I'm thinking I would prefer to receive messages from the future than from the past – like Rishi's letter (except not like Rishi's letter!). There are no DeLorean time machines yet on our horizon, but you never know when we might break through the time barrier. What might I write to the angst-ridden version of myself in the image above? I could write, "You'll be fine. Although right now you feel like life is an enigmatic mess, you'll reach a future that's pretty good. It'll take time and hard work to make it through, but you've never been a stranger to hard work."

Future me knows the times when past me would have valued coaching or support. So future me could send letters tailored to the occasion. However, this could become tiresome for future me – having to write my past self letters would become another task in my never ending list of to-dos. I found it bad enough having to communicate with hotels on a daily basis when we recently walked 500km through Spain. I'm even more irritated when the hotels send me reminders to write the reviews I didn't get around to. Imagine if I had a demanding past self to write letters to and I started feeling guilty because I hadn't written myself enough letters? Or because I hadn't written the right letters? And imagine if past me became annoyed by what future me was saying? I could have an existential crisis over the inevitability of becoming someone I didn't want to be!

Luckily, I don't yet have to worry about whether to send my past self a message. However, I can still think about whether to send my future self a positive reminder from a good today in FutureMe. I'm thinking about it...what d'you reckon?