By Dr. Jocelyn Braun

Who is she, this stranger I have spent my life working for?

The question arrived in the middle of a conversation with Dr Thomas Mathar, a behavioural scientist who thinks about money and long lives, and it has not left me since.

Thomas told me something about the brain I keep returning to. When we are asked to picture ourselves in thirty years, the mind reaches for the same machinery it uses to think about someone we have never met. Our future self is filed among strangers. Which explains a great deal — including why saving can feel less like providence and more like posting money to a person who may never write back.

That idea stirred something deep in me. It made me look back and ask: how have I viewed my future self across my life? Have I treated her well, so that she might be in good spirits when I eventually meet her? What have I sacrificed for her? And has it been worth it?

In my thirties I lived among people who seemed to spend enormous energy worrying about retirement, decades before it arrived. I had come from somewhere I rarely heard anyone speak about the future with that particular anxiety, and I remember wondering why so much attention went to a distant life while a real one was unfolding in front of them.

I judged that too quickly. Worry about the future is often what produces action in the present. People save. They work hard. They build something. They do it for a self they cannot see, hoping that when they finally meet her there will be time and freedom left to enjoy.

But where is the present self in that picture?

Through personal development I was introduced to the idea that life can only truly be lived now, and that the future is a construct of the mind — that worrying about it manufactures misery today in exchange for nothing.

And yet the future arrives. At some point it becomes a now.

So how do we hold both? How do we live in the present while doing something today for a person who exists only in our imagination?

As a teenager I decided I wanted a different life from the one in front of me. The conviction was strong enough that I spent decades working for a future self who would one day inhabit it.

What I did not expect is that she keeps moving. Every time I arrived somewhere, she had stepped further ahead — into a bigger world, a harder challenge, sometimes a better life. She has never once stood still long enough for me to meet her.

Perhaps that is the answer to the question. My future self is not a stranger. She is the person I have been walking towards my whole life, always becoming, never quite arriving.

Thomas made another point that stayed with me. Because the future is uncertain, it is extraordinarily difficult to know how much of the present — time, energy, money — we should be sending forward. We do not know how long we will live, what we will need, or what we will value by then. And where there is no precise answer, we err on the side of more. We save more, work more, prepare more, postpone more.

Postpone more. That is the phrase I would ask you to sit with, if you are the kind of person other people rely on to provide.

I no longer think the future self should be treated as a stranger. She is me, in another time. Like a child, she needs care now so that she may one day be well — happy, healthy, and wealthy in the fullest sense of that word.

But the person doing the caring also matters. I have to stay strong enough, healthy enough and happy enough to keep walking towards her. A present self endlessly depleted in service of the future does not deliver a flourishing person at the other end. It delivers someone exhausted, arriving at a life they no longer have the capacity to enjoy.

I still marvel at people who can simply live for the moment. Perhaps they know something I have yet to learn.

But I have stopped asking whether I will have enough. I have started asking what I am asking money to do for me — and whether the woman I am building all this for would recognise the life I am living in order to reach her.

My conversation with Dr Thomas Mathar — Money as a Mirror for the Mind — is the first episode of The Edge of Meaning. If you haven't seen it yet, watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.