Handwritten letters and a shoebox seems like it would solve a lot of the technical issues, and create something more tangible and special at the same time.

As a father of a five year old, let me send some advice back in time to a dad with a zero year old!

I know this isn’t exactly what you were asking for — apologies please let me suggest changing your goal slightly to try and give your kid a message every year, not just all at once at twenty. More than that let me suggest you do this activity with your kid and not alone.

I’ve seen my child change so fast and I promise you they would rather have gifts and thoughts from you each year then in a big pile at the end. You will also know them much better five years from now (and ten and fifteen) so the letter will mean more to them because of what you know to put in it.

That said, you can still be clever with time! Every year you could write a letter to open in 1, 3, 5 and 10 years so a fifteen year old could have letters from several different times. Don’t forget to include pictures of you and your kid in each one and messages from the kid themselves. They will love it.

It turns out kids just want you to be with them. Use this as a way to be with them.

And lastly, if that suggestion doesn’t feel like enough to you, consider writing a journal about your life and write some of the more personal messages to them there instead. We can’t predict when our kid will want to know us as people better, but it’s probably well into adulthood. When that happens they won’t want advice as much as wanting to know you and all your dreams and struggles.

Good luck and congratulations!

Thanks a lot for your kind words and advice!

"This American Life" had an episode about someone who's deceased Mom did something similar [1].

It sounded like the Mom was looking both to pass on her wisdom to her child, to help prepare her child, and also to control her child's life after the Mom passed away (it's been a while since I listened to it but I don't remember it being presented as a malicious choice - the Mom herself may not have been conscious of it).

I'm not saying that you'll do this, but it's worth thinking about as you start piling up messages to deliver later.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/401/transcript

I see a lot of tech related solutions. Most tech tends to be a bad idea for information longevity, even for 20 years. Multiple hard copies given to trusted friends (or even a legal service) would be the most robust way.

I recently found myself in exactly the same position for exactly the same reason, so happy to share my experience. :)

I decided a priori to stick with email, both because I can't imagine email going away anytime soon, and also because sending an email two main benefits: (1) the content is plain text, and should remain easily readable at the destination, and (2) you get automatic "backups" in your own Sent folder.

I also wanted to avoid any free services because there's no guarantee they'll stick around, or in the case of something like Gmail, keep the account around unused. And, although I'm a really happy paying Fastmail customer for many years, a new email address on my account felt a bit _too_ expensive for just this purpose (especially since I'll eventually pay for an actual address for them).

Because I already pay $5/month for a tiny Linode instance for other purposes, I decided to self-host. Because I don't plan on having the account send any emails (the hard part of self-hosting), setup was relatively pain-free with Postfix. It took a bit of configuration and testing, but I now have an email account for my little one hosted on a subdomain which reliably receives email and stores it in plain-text on the server. Because I set things up in the Maildir format, in the future, it should be simple to also run Dovecot to provide an IMAP interface to actually get at the emails, or import them elsewhere.

I ran into a bunch of pain points throughout the learning process here that I can share, but don't have a reason to believe you'll run into them too, so I don't want to overwhelm. More than happy to get into the specifics of any part of the process if you want!

For how long you being doing this? How is the experience so far, do you have a quota of writing or just send emails organically when you feel that you want to?

Only a few weeks, so the experience is still pretty fresh. :) I do like it, though: dead-simple once the setup was in place, and zero ongoing maintenance so far.

My plan is to keep it entirely organic — so far have I've only really sent a few emails around the more meaningful-feeling milestones. (Arriving home, one week, etc.) I think, long-term, I'd prefer to have the amount of content not feel _overwhelming_ when I hand it off; I'm not planning on having this be the primary way to document my kid's life, but as something "extra" to be able to pass off to them.

[Also, being a few weeks in: I'd warn against making any plans for the first few weeks assuming you'll have much brain capacity available to you. I'd say, don't stress yourself out too much if you can avoid it.]

How about making yourself part of the experiment? Write concurrent letters to; 5y, 10y, 15y, 20y future selves. They receive a time capsule every 5 years. More work, but it will create a record of future-directed perception for both of you. And you get feedback from evolving human as each is opened, for improvement.

With multiple time horizons, choose a physical persistence medium appropriate for each.

A smart contract blockchain will allow you to deploy time and person-bound programs (though using exact-future-date as on-chain conditions is non trivial). An example is time-locked wallets. [1] Messages, files, money: you can put it all in there (big files won't be cheap).

My best bet is on Ethereum still being around in 20 years as it so entrenched.it'll be there for you. As long as people want to pay for using a blockchain to validators.

Non-technology, I would use a notary.

1. https://www.toptal.com/ethereum-smart-contract/time-locked-w...

How would you send a message on ethereum that would be encrypted before hitting the chain, and could be decrypted after some amount of time, without being decryptable before that? Any straightforward approach seems like it'd just rely on an off-chain decryption key, which doesn't really make it any better than putting letters in envelopes with the dates at which they should be opened.

Sarcophagus looks like the closest thing available right now, but it's still unproven enough that I wouldn't really count on it working 20 years from now: https://sarcophagus.io/

Time-locked wallets solve the potential issue of transferring value at some point after death, but can't be used to transfer messages.. not ones which aren't readable at the time you send them anyway

I think you're better of making a blog style (or similar) page for him...e-mail providers would eventually delete older emails to save space. Especially if you don't log into the account and it becomes active

Perhaps the blog you could store in the cloud somewhere, along with regular backups in the form of physical media? Over time, make backups on any other kind of new storage that comes along. I think redundancy would be key for this.

I'd recommend writing those things as physical letters on paper, but if you're really into using email for this, you might consider standing up your own server to do that. It's not as hard as you might think.

I personally can't think of an online service I'd trust to keep my emails for 20 years. I'd absolutely want them on a machine I'm running myself.

Yup. Definitely written letters, or at worst print out the emails.

Even if the service is around in 20 years, there's a high probability that the account will be disabled or deleted for nonuse.

I wonder if Western Union can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA1LmWWYxWY

Use the AWS free tier.

Add the message to a DynamoDB table with a send date. Create an Eventbridge rule that runs every month and calls a Lambda function. Have the Lambda function query the DynamoDB table and email you the message using SES if the time stamp is reached.

Assuming AWS doesn’t change their free tier in the next 20 years, this should be free.

I’ve used this in the past: http://futureme.org

You can give your kid an email account, but you can’t make them check it.

Have you considered gluing stuff into a scrapbook instead?

Yeah I'm considering scrapbook + polaroids (or printing pictures) and gluing them into the pages. I just don't think it will be practical as something digital.

On the other hand it will be more personal? Less ephemeral? Or is that just me being old fashioned?

There are many ways of sending messages to the future.

I'd be far more interested in ways of sending messages to the past.

Typed and printed in your language of choice.

Put it into a safety deposit box.

Create a will mentioning said box explicitly, just in case something happens.

For the techy solution, in addition to above, create emails with the big 3, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Send the emails to them. Include passwords in the safety deposit box.

Search your favorite online bookstore for “20 year journal”. It’s perfect for this use case.

I'm sure Gmail had an advert about this, but I wouldn't trust Google with that.

The best way would be to register a domain. That way you can move the email to whatever provider you find the most stable.

Currently, Fastmail seems like a pretty good bet, but you can switch without changing the email address.

Would they progressively access it or is this a time capsule that you want to add to until they are 20, but they get in one big dump?

Good question, if I use email would work because the date and subject of each email (still a huge inbox to read), but I didn't thought much in others alternatives. One could be markdown files, one file by each post sorted by date (kinda like an offline blog in obsidian.md).

There is a danger if the email is hacked. Handwriting or signed mail is more difficult to imitate.

I mean a .txt made in notepad on Windows 95 will still open in Windows 11 right?

But how do you make sure the SSD doesn't die or the computer with the TXT file doesn't get sold off?

Put everything in a folder ai will handle the rest in 20 years