Planting trees you will not sit under

An oak takes about thirty years before it is worth standing under and a couple of centuries before it is properly itself. Anyone planting one at fifty has done the arithmetic and gone ahead anyway. This is such a well-worn example that it has become a proverb in several languages, which is usually a sign that people found the behaviour genuinely puzzling and needed a phrase to file it under.

It is puzzling. Most of what we want, we want to be there for. The forward wish gives that up at the outset.

There are roughly three distances involved, and they behave differently enough to be worth separating.

The nearest is the wish for a future self. You at sixty, you in five years, you after the thing you are currently inside has finished. This one is odd because the recipient both is and is not you. People write letters to open in a decade, or set something aside for a version of themselves they cannot yet picture, and there is always a slight formality to it, a sense of addressing a relative rather than oneself. The you who opens it will have information you do not have and will have forgotten things you currently cannot imagine forgetting.

The middle distance is wishing for your children, or anyone's children, where you will overlap with the outcome for part of it but not the end. You will see whether they are happy at nine. You will probably not see whether they are happy at seventy, which is the part you actually care about.

The furthest is the wish for a world you will not be in. That the place is habitable. That the work you did gets used. That something you built or wrote or planted is still standing. Here there is no overlap at all, and no possible confirmation, and people do it constantly.

The problem of the sealed box

Time capsules are the clearest case, and also the one that shows the mechanism most plainly, because they almost always disappoint.

A capsule is buried with enormous ceremony. When it is opened, decades later, the contents are typically a newspaper, some coins, photographs of people nobody present recognises, and a letter explaining what life was like, written in the strained voice of someone addressing an audience they cannot picture. The opening is usually flatter than the burying was.

Which is telling. The value was clearly in the burying. Deciding what to put in a box for the future is a forced exercise in working out what about your own moment you consider worth keeping, and everybody who does it takes it seriously, and then the answer turns out to be mostly newspapers. The future is not really the beneficiary. It is the pretext.

Wishing without a receipt

Every other kind of wish at least holds open the possibility of finding out. The forward wish is structurally denied that. You will not learn whether the tree grew, whether the child was happy at seventy, whether the world held together.

That sounds like it should make the whole thing hollow. In practice it seems to do the opposite. Having no possible confirmation strips out the parts of wanting that are about yourself. You cannot be wishing for the feeling of being proved right, or for the satisfaction of seeing it, because neither is on offer. What is left is a fairly pure preference about how things go after you, which is close to the only kind of wanting that is unarguably not self-interested.

People notice this most sharply at the points where the future suddenly becomes concrete: a birth, a diagnosis, a will being written. Wishes cluster at turning points partly because a turning point is when you are forced to look past the immediate week, and the view from there is longer than most of us usually allow ourselves.

What we get wrong about it

The failure mode of forward wishing is specificity, and it is a kind failure that causes real harm.

A parent who wishes their child will be a doctor has not made a wish, they have made a plan with someone else's life in it. The child will feel the weight of it whether or not it is ever said out loud, and if they turn out to want something different they will experience that as a loss they have caused. Detailed forward wishes tend to arrive as instructions.

The ones that hold up are vaguer, and the vagueness is doing real work. That they are all right. That they have somebody. That it is easier for them than it was for me. These leave the future free to be itself while still saying, unmistakably, that you cared how it went. This is the point at which the argument for ordinary hopes runs into the argument about the future and they turn out to be the same argument.

There is something almost unbearable about the form once you look straight at it. You are wanting something on behalf of a time that will not include you, in which you will be, at best, a name somebody half remembers.

And still every generation does it. Trees, capsules, savings accounts, buildings designed to last longer than their architects, letters written to people who may never read them. None of it is answered. All of it is sent anyway.

The oak does not know who planted it. That was understood at the time, by whoever was holding the spade, and they dug the hole regardless.