FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
December 21, 2005
Postcards from the Future
It sounds like the premise for a film--you receive an email from a loved one who passed away a week before. There are several sites now promoting this service, such as LastWishes.com and MyLastEmail.com. You can write an email that will be sent out to family, or to enemies, after your death. It sounds kind of creepy to me, like a horror film. It could also be potentially heartbreaking for the recipients, but to each their own.
A far less touchy subject is writing an email from yourself, to yourself, that will arrive years later. Two Websites offering this service are MailtotheFuture.com and FutureMe.org. You can send yourself any kind of note, but as this Associated Press story points out, many users approach the service in the same way--as a future reminder of their dreams and aspirations. It is largely a motivational exercise.
In college I took a creative writing class where the teacher had us all write ourselves a letter. She promised to mail it out one year later. I wrote about my hobbies and my pursuit of writing fiction; I talked about my relationship with my girlfriend (now my wife); and I mailed myself a $10 bill. When I got that letter a year later, I had completely forgotten the exercise. It was interesting to get a glimpse into your past and see what you had thought of the future. And the money didn't hurt either.
How would you put such unusual email services to use?
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at December 21, 2005 12:39 PM | Category: internet + web |
5 Comments
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I guess this is no different from someone leaving a videotape of his or her last wishes. But still, I don't know how I'd feel in getting a message from my Dad now, and it's been two weeks since he passed away. Maybe I would be thankful for a final message, but I'm not certain it wouldn't just make things more difficult emotionally.
I would suspect some users to use this service to remind them of future events, i.e. reminders for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
There's lots of potential here for the introspective among us. How about for example
- listing a handful of hopes for the next year,
- current feelings about what's important to us,
- observations on what direction we're going with our work,
- for me it may be be where I hope to publish work or get my art pieces shown.
Comparing what we wrote, our concerns or our hopes with the actuality of what happens could reinforce our ability to affect change in our lives.
And for people going through difficult periods this might be a great way to demonstrate in a concrete way that even the most difficult period passes, hearts don't always stay broken and a job situation that looks bleak today may be very positive in the not so distant future.
There are two big problems with this:
1) I probably won't have the same e-mail address in 20 years that I do now. I have changed my "main" email probably 2 or 3 times since the mid 90s...and I would say there are people who have changed them many more than that. Changes in ISP, workplaces, etc make the e-mail address a very unsure way of keeping track of someone.
2) Email, as we know it, probably won't exist 20 years from now. Tech change happens faster than ever. It's a slightly awkward anology...but this is like someone in 1939 selling "telegrams from the future" that would arrive in 1989. Cool when sent...but crappy when recieved.
I would use this service to remind me of my values set. It would be particularly useful if you could set it to e-mail you once every say tweleve to eighteen months with a list of your core values and details of how you arrived at each one.
Commercially, I'd love to use it as a way of doing the same for my clients, many who are brand / marketing managers of large organisations. There brand responsibilities of course dictate that they undertsamd the essence of their brands' intimately...Alas, many continue to forget them! Once again, a 12-18 month reminder would be most useful.
Cheers for now...TIM THe Ideas Guy.
www.theideasguy.com.au