I have a habit I never quite named. Every so often, usually when I am tired or my work is going badly, I picture a version of myself I daydream about more than I’d admit. A remote job, writing. A small house somewhere with land around it. A few kids in the garden. I am not making any of it up — I’ve held that picture for years.
The strange part is how much of that version actually arrived. The remote writing job is here. The country is here (sometimes). The kids in the garden are not, yet, but the picture has not faded. It still shows up.
For years I assumed this was just idle daydreaming, the mental equivalent of doodling in the margins. Then I learned about something similar that two psychologists put a name on three decades ago.
A note before I go further. I am not a psychologist or any kind of clinician, and this is reading and reflection on one theory, not advice. The research here describes patterns across groups of people. It is not a prescription for any individual life, including yours.
The lives we never live, named
In September 1986, the psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius published a paper called “Possible Selves” in American Psychologist. Most thinking about the self up to that point had focused on who you are now, the stable, current self-concept. Markus and Nurius were interested in something looser and more future-tilted: the selves you might become.
Their definition is the part I keep coming back to. Markus and Nurius wrote that possible selves “represent individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.” They argued these imagined futures provide a conceptual link between cognition and motivation. The imagined futures, they proposed, are not just scenery in the mind. They act as incentives, quietly pulling at the choices you make today.
This is the founding proposition of a theory, not a settled law of how all motivation works. But as a frame for that daydream of mine, it landed harder than anything else I had read.
Anwway, as I said Markus and Nurius sorted these into three rough groups: the selves you hope to become, the selves you expect to become, and the selves you are afraid of becoming. You can feel the difference between them in your own chest if you sit with it for a second.
The expected ones, for me, came as a kind of background script. Not a voice from any one person, just the pressure in the air about what you were supposed to have sorted by thirty. The house, the marriage, the career ticked off in the conventional shape. Nobody had to say anything. The expected self was doing the talking on its own.
And then there are the hoped-for ones, which are quieter than they look.
The picture I described at the start was a hoped-for self, even though I would not have called it that at the time. The writing, the country, the kids in the garden. For most of the years I held it, none of it was anywhere near my actual life. It just sat there, vivid, the way some imagined futures do — not loud, not constantly present, but reliably there when I went looking.
What I find interesting in hindsight is how much of it pulled at decisions I did not consciously connect back to it. The moves I made. The work I learned to do. The places I chose to stay or leave. Looking back, the picture was steering a lot of it, even when I thought I was just stumbling forward.
This is the part of the theory I find most useful. The hoped-for version does its work quietly, sometimes for years, before any of it arrives. Later work by Daphna Oyserman looked at what happens when you pair a hoped-for self with a feared one in the same area of life. In their summary of the idea, Lee and Oyserman describe how holding both images “serves as a carrot and a stick, simultaneously reminding the student of the goal (the carrot) and of where the student may end up if effort is not sustained (the stick).” They also note that students with this kind of balance “are less likely to be involved in delinquent activities… and are more likely to attain better grades.” Worth saying clearly: those are correlations, not proof that the combination causes the results.
Closing thoughts
I am not going to tell you to sit down and audit your possible selves like a spreadsheet. That is not how any of this works for me. What changed was smaller and quieter. When I notice myself pushing hard toward something, or holding onto a particular picture of how things could be, I now occasionally ask which imagined version of me is doing the pulling. Sometimes it is a future I have wanted for a long time. Sometimes it is just the script in the air, the expected self I never actually chose.
Knowing the difference does not solve anything, but it does make the choice feel like mine rather than the room’s. It might for you too.
If any of this lands closer to home than it is interesting, and the unlived version of your life is doing more than the occasional bit of background work, talking it through with a qualified therapist is worth more than any article on the subject.
