The Hard Way - Sept 17 2026

 

The Hard Way

Sept 17 2026

I often encounter words

I don’t remember writing.

It’s like encountering your old self;

a younger version

you instantly recognize

but would rather disown.

Would go back

and shake some sense into,

pass on words of wisdom 

you found hard enough to learn.

Like a stern editor

take a red pen to the work

and hope he sees the light.

And words from my future self?

I keep my ears cocked

anxiously waiting to hear.

Not, as you might imagine

hoping for stock tips

or winning lotteries,

but news of who I’ll become.

That change is possible.

That, if not contentment 

I’ll at least find comfort. 

Or just a sentence

of reassuring words

  —  that there’s a future at all

given how things are.

And if he does know the answer

to the existential questions

we all contend with toward the end of life,

that he keep it to himself;

I’d rather learn the hard way,

keep searching on my own.

A rare day when I had no propulsive ideas and felt no compulsion to write. So after a  couple of false starts, I gave up; and instead, opened the blog and reread some recent work. Which I almost never do. 

I’m often initially surprised, but then they mostly do come back to me: the circumstance under which I wrote, the choices I went back and forth on. And, of course, I have to resist revisiting and making some final (as if I can ever be completely satisfied!) tweaks.

Old words I might feel good about, might not remember, or might regret. Which gave me this poem. Or at least its start. Where it eventually went, it did on its own.

(When everything seems to live on the internet forever, regret seems to be a big one; at least with celebrities and job searchers. Especially in this day of cancel culture, virtue signalling, and the ungenerous judgemental milieu of social media. Luckily, I’m not a celebrity, don’t bother with social media, and neither need a real job nor have any intention of seeking office!)

But it was helpful to reread. It kept me acutely aware of my main failing:  too many words, too much complexity. Which I think helped keep this poem both simple and short, just like all the poems I usually like best. 

When they research personal growth and change, they find people have a contradictory view of their past and future self:  looking back, recognizing how much they’ve changed; but looking ahead, figuring they’re pretty much done. In psychology, this has been called the “end-of-history” illusion. Here’s how my AI assistant explains this:

A quite different, empirically grounded sense comes from a 2013 study in Science by Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson. Across more than 19,000 participants of all ages, people recognized they had changed a great deal over the past decade but expected to change relatively little in the next one. As the authors summarized: “Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain. History, it seems, is always ending today” (BBC Future; original paper, Harvard). The likely cause is motivational: people like who they are now and resist entertaining further change. The practical cost is regrettable decisions — tattooing a current belief on your skin, or overpaying for future access to today’s preferences.