Letter to my younger self

Dear Anthony,

                          When I was your age I was very insecure and worried about my place in the world.  I want to tell you that although you are feeling very insecure and vulnerable and have numerous worries one day you will grow up to be smug middle aged man who writes pompous letters talking down to your younger self.   

You will of course be incapable of empathising with what your younger self would have thought of you today but you will be able to make up for that with a smug and patronising prose style.  Whereas at the moment you are relatively humble as you approach your 5^th decade you will suddenly become insufferably vain.   

You will want the Aston Martin that you never wanted when you were young enough to look cool driving one and went everywhere on public transport.  You will also be able to bore yourself and any casual readers with examples of the conspicuous consumption you fill the empty voids in your life with.  You will be very proud of your career successes despite the fact that in the grand scheme of things you haven’t really had any.  Also you will gradually start turning into a snob.  

Increasingly as you get older you will become more and more intolerant to the point where you think Ghengis Khan was a bit of a pussycat and even more amazingly you will convince yourself that this is some kind of virtue.  While becoming more intolerant in private you will modify your public persona to be far more laid back and accommodating than you really are.  

At the moment you are worried about the security of your job but don’t worry as you age you will become increasingly talented at stabbing other people in the back while making a smaller and smaller contribution to the betterment of society.   

Today you feel full of untapped creativity but do not worry as you age your creativity will decline to the point where you hardly ever push yourself intellectually at all.   

Finally you will become brilliant at looking down at young people and being unable to even consider the possibility that their lives might be even harder than yours was at that age.  In short my younger self … one day you will grow up to be a complete berk.

Lots of hate

Anthony