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A viral video made with artificial intelligence shows celebrities meeting their younger versions, reflecting a feeling of love and understanding.
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The past is immutable, but present actions influence the future. Self-love today determines the quality of future life.
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Thinking strategically, as runners do, helps keep the body healthy. Appreciating the present instead helps you make informed choices and improves your future well-being.
Thereis a video made with artificial intelligence that has gone viral these days: it depicts famous people meeting their own young people. There is Will Smith, Keanu Reeves, Julia Roberts, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Clint Eastwood and many others. Not much happens in the video: it is a sequence of short fragments in which two versions of them decades apart meet at the same time. What they have in common is the affectionate attitude that each version (past and old or present) has toward the other. The young version embraces the mature one and vice versa. What emerges is a feeling of love and understanding. Beyond the technical merit (or otherwise) of these now increasingly common artificial intelligence-generated videos, it is significant that those who produced them chose a specific key. In short: you may or may not like them, you may or may not find flaws in them (let’s say it is impossible to mistake them for real videos) but an interesting point of view emerges from them, that is, they make you think. The question is, did you love or will you love your previous or future versions?
Let’s forget the past
Given that the past cannot be changed, all that remains is to act on the future through your actions in the present. The future is not something that will just come but is something that will happen also and especially in relation to what happens today, that is, how you decide to behave. In other words: how much do you decide today to love yourself? Do you love yourself? Will your future self thank your past self for caring for the body it finds itself after several decades?
This is a difficult perspective to take because it requires some effort and imagination. We are so accustomed to instant gratification and a certain distrust of the future (“Things will always get worse,” “How are we going to do it?”, “Everything is rotten”: ever heard these speeches?) that we try to grab whatever we can find in the present.
To be less entrenched in instant gratification, one must have strategic thinking, that is, one that looks toward the future and seeks to build it through daily actions, even the smallest. The definition “strategic thinking” might create some distance, as if it is something complicated, something that does not concern you. Instead it simply means understanding that a series of actions in the present time has repercussions in the future and decides its shape.
If you’re running you’re already doing it
Those who run think strategically, even without realizing it. Taking care of your body, eating well, being aware of the importance of balance between body and mind are all actions that increase the chances you are giving your future self to be physically fit, a little different in appearance (aged, but that is inevitable) but all in all happy and grateful to the past self for the decisions you made and the good habits consistently maintained that kept the body vessel in good shape for long decades.
Strategic perspective is not usual, and it is certainly difficult to have it when you are young, but after a certain age it is healthy to make it normal, and to think about it all the time, evaluating what you do in the present for how it will project into the future.
When you realize that you are not immortal you can have at least two reactions:
- Depress
- Appreciate every single moment of life.
When there is an abundance of something (type of life and the years you have to live it) it is normal to think that there will be forever, thus giving it a lower value. As the availability of something (of years, for example) decreases, one can, in short, react by valuing each and every moment, savoring it and being aware of it. Above all: not wasting it.
To one day embrace your Past Self and say, “Thank you for what you did, I love you.”