The web app timemachine.love aims to help people heal their relationships with their past, present, and future versions of themselves.
The Institute for Love and Time (TILT) launched a web app to help people practice unconditional love for their whole selves—past, present, and future. “It’s a self-guided tour through your own process of becoming more unconditionally loving and loving yourself unconditionally,” says project director Dr. Julia Mossbridge. She defines unconditional love as “feeling loved and loving without the need for anything to change.”
The website is timemachine.love and here’s how it works:
- Rate your well-being and hopefulness. Every time you visit it, you’ll be prompted to use sliders to report on your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being, as well as how hopeful you’re feeling. The idea is that you visit every day and the program creates a “hope map,” showing how your level of hope evolves over time and as you use the website.
- Record a voice message for your future self to listen to later. You can respond to a prompt about your past, present, or future, or do your own thing.
- Return to the site the following day to hear from your “past self.” You’ll be notified that you have a message and encouraged to listen to it with love.
- After three days, you gain access to the Meditation Tent: a digital space to listen to self-compassion focused mantras from the The Institute for Love and Time team or record your own.
- After another three days, you gain access to the Hope Garden. Here you can plant digital seeds of hope and nurture them with whatever they need to thrive. You can also plant seeds in the community garden where you can see and water others’ seeds of hope, or record messages of support and congratulations to their future selves.
- Build a supportive online community. With support from the app developers, you can also create a closed community garden for a specific group, like a support group for a particular mental health concern, or a group for people who live in the same location. In a closed group, you can nurture and interact with the hopes and messages from people you know and can relate to.
Why Focus on Your Past and Future?
Often when we talk about mindfulness practice, we put a lot of focus on the present moment. In fact, we often talk about the present as being the only thing that really exists. However, Mossbridge says the past and future exist in this present moment, too, because they also affect our minds and our bodies. When you acknowledge this and practice love and care for yourself across time, “you become more solid as a person and stronger as a person,” she says. This kind of healthy relationship with every version of ourselves is called having a balanced time perspective.
Instead of looking at each moment as separate, she explains, we can imagine each moment as a bead that we add to a string. What happens when you have a balanced time perspective is that you go from characterizing yourself by each individual event that happens—each bead—and you gain a new view of yourself as the continuous part that runs through each moment—the string.
The Future of timemachine.love
Behind the scenes, TILT is starting to run pilot programs with the app for therapists to use with closed groups and for underserved communities like incarcerated individuals, some Indigenous communities, and veterans.
“One thing that we find is that improvement in well-being is mediated by the feeling that people have control over how the app is developed,” says Eric Smith, who works on tech and growth. A key part of their strategy is that they welcome users to also be collaborators, sharing what they like, what they want to add, and what resonates. For example, some Indigenous communities have existing narratives about time and time travel in their cultures, so app developers can shape the app in a way that works with their traditions.
A more long-term element of their growth strategy is to build shared value using a transparent opt-in model for selling the health and wellness data gathered through the app. “We don’t ever sell people’s audio journaling data or personal data or anything—we’re a non-profit, we don’t make any money off of it and we won’t—unless people want us to,” Smith says. “It’s really valuable and we want the users to understand it is valuable data and empower them to use the data as they would like.”
He says that if a user decided to monetize their data, developers would first remove any identifiers from it using artificial intelligence. Choosing to opt-in could also give a user voting rights, allowing them to weigh in on decisions about what they’d like to see from the app going forward, although Smith and colleagues are still exploring what the process might look like.
“We’d really like to move from collaborating just meaning focus groups and piloting to collaborating meaning shared value all around for the users, for people buying the data, and for TILT. That’s the three to five year vision,” Smith says.
