Thinking about my future self — the unglamorous version

Last night I did my end-of-year planning session — the proper one, the one I've been putting off since mid-December because it requires a kind of honesty that's easier to avoid when there are candles to light and books to read and very good reasons to just leave the planner closed. But I got there eventually. The planner open on the kitchen table, the hot drink cooling beside it, the lamp on, the particular combination of ambition and peace that I always feel at this time of year and haven't found a better word for.

And for the first time in a long time, I spent some of that session not planning the next three months but writing a letter. To myself. At sixty. About what I hope I'll have built by then.

I want to tell you about that letter — and about the slower, less glamorous version of thinking about the future that I've been doing this year. I'm going to be clear upfront: I'm not going to talk about property ladders or investment portfolios or anything that requires expertise I genuinely don't have. This isn't that kind of blog and I'm not qualified for those conversations. What I can speak to is the quiet, unglamorous work of thinking ahead — of making small decisions now for a version of me who doesn't exist yet and who I'm trying to build toward. The question of how to build generational wealth is one I've seen everywhere this year, and I want to talk about it sideways — not the financial mechanics, but the mental model underneath.

The letter to sixty-year-old me

I've never done this exercise before, and I was surprised by how clarifying it was. Not comfortable — clarifying. There's a difference. Sitting down to write about what you hope you'll have built by sixty forces a kind of precision that vague long-term thinking doesn't. You have to actually reckon with the fact that the sixty-year-old version of you is being constructed, right now, by the person writing the letter.

What I wrote wasn't about money, mostly — or not primarily. It was about choices. I wrote that I hoped sixty-year-old me would have options. The option to take a month somewhere quiet if she wanted to. The option to help someone in the family without it causing panic. The option to work on things because she finds them meaningful, not because the rent is due in five days. The option to say no to things that don't fit her life.

Options are what I mean when I talk about building something. Not accumulation for its own sake. Not a number on a screen. The ability to choose — that's the actual goal. And I think naming it that way changes what you do about it, because "build options" is a different instruction from "accumulate wealth." It's more personal. It's more specific. It points toward different decisions.

What "building" looks like in my context

I've started three habits this year that feel like the right foundation, even though none of them are interesting enough to go viral on a how to build generational wealth post. They're small, consistent, and — as promised in this title — entirely unsexy.

The first is spending less than I earn, consistently, even when inconsistently is easier. I don't have a complicated budgeting system. I have a rough awareness of what comes in and what goes out, and I try to make the gap at least small and positive every month. Some months it's better than others. It has never once been exciting. It has also never once stopped being important.

The second is learning about money slowly and without shame. I came into adulthood with a serious lack of financial literacy — not because I was careless but because nobody really sat down and explained it, and I was too embarrassed to ask questions as an adult. I've been reading things, quietly, at my own pace, without turning it into a personality or a content category. One concept at a time. No one is watching and that helps.

The third is treating the future as a person I have a responsibility toward. This sounds abstract but it's actually practical. When I'm about to spend money on something impulsive, I sometimes ask: does this serve the sixty-year-old or does this serve the boredom of right now? Often the answer is honestly "boredom of right now" — and sometimes I still buy the thing, because that's also part of being alive. But asking the question has changed the ratio. Slowly.

What I'm not trying to do

I want to be honest about what this is not, because the internet has a way of turning every gentle practice into a competitive sport.

I'm not trying to keep up with anyone. The friends who bought flats in their twenties, the people in my rough life-stage who seem to have it sorted, the content I see from people whose relationship with money looks effortless and aspirational — none of that is the benchmark. My situation is my situation. My starting point is my starting point. Comparison here is genuinely useless and I've had to actively put it down several times this year.

I'm also not on anyone else's timeline. I used to feel behind — significantly, gnawingly behind — as if there were a standard route through adulthood that sensible people followed and I'd somehow missed several stops. I don't feel that way anymore, or at least I feel it less. The timeline that matters is the one between now and the sixty-year-old I'm writing letters to. That's long enough. There's time in it, if I use it gently and consistently.

The best gift for your future self is the small action you start today — not the grand plan, not the perfect moment, just the small thing you actually do.

The planning session, and what I felt when I closed the planner

I want to come back to that kitchen table scene, because it was more meaningful than I expected. The planner had the year ahead sketched out in broad strokes — content ideas, habits I want to continue, a few things I want to learn. Nothing dramatic. But the letter to sixty-year-old me was sitting on top of the planner, and I read it back once before closing everything up.

What I'd written wasn't extraordinary. It was very ordinary, actually — a woman hoping to have been kind to herself and consistent with the small things, hoping to have built something sustainable from a small flat and a paper journal and a willingness to keep going. Hoping to have options. Hoping to have mattered to a few people in quiet ways.

I felt, when I closed the planner, something I want to describe carefully because it's not triumphant and it's not sad. It was something like settled. Like: I know what I'm building and I know it's not glamorous and I know it's going to take a long time and that's okay. The ambition is there, just worn quietly. The peace is there too, right next to it, not fighting it.

That combination — ambition and peace, held together — is the thing I've been chasing this year without quite knowing it. I think the end-of-year planning session is where I finally caught it.

Small, consistent, unsexy. The inheritance of the self I'm trying to leave myself.

I want to add one more thing before I close this, because I keep thinking about it and I think it belongs here. When I talk about building options, I'm very aware that this framing is itself a kind of privilege — the ability to think long-term requires a degree of short-term stability that not everyone has, and I want to hold that carefully. I'm not trying to dress up basic financial responsibility as spiritual practice, or to suggest that anyone who isn't building carefully toward their future self is failing. Circumstances vary enormously. Timelines vary. Starting points vary.

What I can speak to is my own starting point, my own context, my own slowly evolving relationship with a future that used to feel purely theoretical and now feels like a direction I'm actually moving in. The letter to sixty-year-old me sits in my journal now. I'll read it again in December next year, and the December after that, and see what needs updating.

The planner is closed. The hot drink has been refilled. Outside the window it's properly dark, the December dark that falls before five o'clock and makes the flat feel like the only warm thing in the world. The ambition and the peace are sitting side by side, which is the state I most want to carry into January: wanting something, knowing it takes time, feeling okay about that. The real glow up, honestly, is that combination. Not the achievement, but the steady orientation toward it. Not the destination but the person you become while you're walking toward it, slowly, one small consistent unsexy habit at a time.

That's enough to start the new year with. It genuinely is.