Letters to My Younger Selves

One of my best calls: Clare in the 1980s

Aged 9

It’s 1960, and you think you are weird. You think you might be an alien. You think even your parents don’t understand you.

You are right.

You are a smart INTP, a type vanishingly rare in the population (3–4%). You’re drawn to maths, physics, and abstract truths, and you struggle with a world that seems focused on the mundane. Relax - it’s going to turn out fine.

In the future, you will meet people just like you. At university, in the political movements you’ll join, and later in your career in high-tech R&D. You’ll form connections with others who share your curiosity, your desire for understanding, and your tendency to dive deep into topics which interest you. These 'faults' of yours will turn out to be strengths.

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Aged 18

It’s 1969, and you’re about to go to Warwick University to study maths, physics, and engineering. You want to be a theoretical physicist: in the event, this is not going to work out. Warwick will feel like a profoundly alienating environment - the staff too remote, the material too familiar... and too practical - you always hated experiments.

By the end of your first year, you’ll switch to philosophy and politics, drawn by the promise of grappling with concepts new to you. But your new-found political activism will become all-consuming. You’ll miss lectures, focus instead on the International Marxist Group, and, eventually, get thrown out of university. What follows are years of menial jobs and teaching in secondary-modern schools. Your parents will despair.

And yet - sticking with physics would have been a disaster. Theoretical physics in the 1970s had reached a dead end: progress stalled - as it remains stalled today. Economics or computer science might seem like better bets in hindsight, but economics was (and is) a conceptual mess, and computing barely existed then.

Instead, your messy trajectory will give you something more profound: a rich, unified education in Marxism, encompassing economics, politics, history, and philosophy. It will sharpen your mind, refine your ability to analyze systems, and reveal, over the next decade, the flawed Rousseauan assumptions at its core.

Most importantly, it will lead you to Clare - your future wife, your partner for 47 years and counting. In her, you’ll find someone who complements your other-wordly competences and preoccupations; thoroughly-grounded and quite opinionated, she’ll be your guide in navigating life. She might also be, quite simply, the only woman in the world who could have put up with you.

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Aged 36

It’s now 1987, and you’re working at STL, a world-class R&D laboratory. You have a PhD in artificial intelligence, a field you’ve been passionate about since your early science-fiction reading days. Your marriage is sometimes ‘exciting’ but flourishing, and you have two lively sons who you mostly subcontract to your wife. Life feels stable and promising.

Your fortunes, however, are about to change. STL is about to be acquired by Northern Telecom, and the new owners will have no interest in AI. Briefly, you’ll consider academia, but the prospects - low pay, limited opportunities - are bleak. Instead, you’ll retrain as a telecoms network architect/designer. This decision will catapult your career, placing you at the forefront of a global revolution: the building of the public internet.

You’ll travel the world, collaborating with smart, highly-motivated people and contributing to the infrastructure that will define the 21st century. Meanwhile, AI will enter a long winter, stalling until the 2010s when computing power finally catches up. By then, large language models will reignite AI optimism, offering astonishing practical potential to transform industries.

But the hard problem of consciousness - the enigma of subjective experience - will remain as unfathomable as ever. The fundamental research programme - so mistakenly termed “artificial intelligence” - will still be chasing shadows, trying to understand the very thing that makes us uniquely human.

Another bullet dodged.

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Aged 72

It’s 2023, just two years ago. My advice: savour this moment. Clare and you are in a good place - comfortable and healthy.

And yet, sooner than you think, your aging bodies will begin to show their vulnerabilities. This is entirely normal, of course, and hardly unexpected. But it will still catch you off guard, as it does for everyone. Clare’s sudden health crisis and your own similar issues will change the paradigm in which you live: suddenly other concerns begin to intrude.

Being accepted into the Catholic Church (Clare is a cradle Catholic) was a wise decision of yours. Not because you were looking for easy answers, but because of its 2,000 years of experience as a repository of values and processes. You’ll find comfort not in dogma but in the Church’s quiet acknowledgment of life’s impermanence and its embrace of grace in the face of mortality.

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Now (2025)

My advice to all my past selves remains the same: change nothing. Every twist and turn in your life, every seeming failure or detour, has led you to this point. It could all have been far worse, but hard to see that it could have been better.

Thinking about it properly, in the round.

The deterministic multiverse, with its branching threads of causality, concurs.

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