Time Capsule Questions for Every Age
Time capsule questions are prompts answered today and read back years later: favourites, fears, friends, prices and predictions. The ones that work ask for something specific that will have changed by the opening date — a name, a number, a guess — and the answers land hardest when they are filmed or recorded rather than typed.
A time capsule with no questions in it is a box of objects. The questions are what turn it into a conversation with someone who does not exist yet.
These lists are grouped by who is answering. Take ten, not all of them, and ask the same ten again every year if you can.
Updated
How to ask them
Ask out loud and record the answer. A six-year-old's handwriting is charming; their voice explaining who their best friend is, and why, is the thing you will actually replay.
Do not correct anything. The wrong answers — the mispronounced dinosaur, the confident plan to become a dragon — are the ones that will matter. The capsule is a record, not a test.
Prefer questions whose answer expires. Favourite food, best friend, what you are afraid of, what a phone costs. A question whose answer will be the same in ten years is not doing any work.
Then ask the same questions again next year. One set of answers is a snapshot; the same ten questions answered at five, six, seven and eight are a film of someone growing up.
Time capsule questions for young children (4–8)
Short, concrete, and about their world as it is today. Film it: most of the answer is in the face.
Favourites
- What is your favourite food, and what is the worst food in the world?
- What is your favourite toy, and what is its name?
- What is your favourite song? Can you sing a bit of it?
- What is the best book or programme, and what happens in it?
Their world
- Who is your best friend, and what do you do together?
- What is the best thing about school, and the worst?
- What are you really good at?
- What are you scared of?
- What makes you laugh the most?
The future
- What do you want to be when you grow up?
- How old is old?
- Where will you live when you are a grown-up, and who with?
- What do you want to say to yourself when you are big?
Questions for teenagers
Teenagers answer honestly on one condition: that nobody reads it before the date. Let them write or record it alone, and seal it themselves.
Right now
- What are you listening to, watching and playing this month?
- Who are your closest friends, and how did you meet each of them?
- What takes up most of your time, and would you choose it again?
- What is on your phone's home screen?
What you think
- What do adults get wrong about people your age?
- What is one thing you believe that most people around you do not?
- What are you most worried about, for yourself and for the world?
- What are you proud of that nobody has noticed?
Later
- What do you hope you are doing in ten years? What do you expect?
- Which of your friends will you still be in touch with?
- What do you never want to forget about being this age?
- What would you like to ask the person reading this?
Questions for couples
Answer separately, without comparing notes, and read each other's when it opens.
How it is now
- What does an ordinary weekday evening look like for us?
- What do we argue about most, and who is usually right?
- What do you do that I have never told you I love?
- What is our song, our place and our in-joke this year?
How we got here
- What did you think the first time we met?
- When did you know?
- What is the hardest thing we have been through so far?
Where we are going
- Where will we be living when this opens?
- What will we have that we do not have now, and what will we have given up?
- What are you hoping we never change?
- What do you want to say to me on the day this opens?
Questions for a class or a graduating year
Every student answers the same sheet. The interest is in the spread of answers, and in who turned out to be right.
This year
- What will you remember about this class in ten years?
- Who made you laugh the most this year?
- What was the best day, and what happened?
- What is everyone wearing, saying and listening to?
Predictions
- Where will you be living in ten years, and what will you be doing?
- Who in this class is most likely to be famous, and for what?
- What will have been invented by the time this opens?
- What will a coffee, a cinema ticket and a phone cost?
To the reunion
- What do you hope has not changed about you?
- What advice would you give the person you will be?
- What do you want to say to everyone in this room, ten years from now?
Questions for a family, and for grandparents
Go round the table, one question each, with a phone recording in the middle. The grandparent questions are the ones with a deadline.
Round the table
- What does a normal Sunday look like in this family?
- What is the meal everybody asks for?
- What is the family rule that nobody outside would understand?
- What was the best day we had together this year?
For a grandparent
- What was your house like when you were my age?
- What did your parents do, and what were they like?
- How did the two of you meet?
- What was the first thing you bought with your own money?
- What is the biggest change you have seen in your lifetime?
- What do you want your great-grandchildren to know about you?
For everyone
- What do you think this family will look like in twenty years?
- What should we still be doing together when this opens?
Questions to ask yourself
The hardest audience, because you know when you are lying. Answer on video, alone, in one take.
Where you are
- What does a normal day look like, hour by hour?
- Who do you see most, and who do you miss?
- What do you spend money on without thinking?
- What are you avoiding?
What you think
- What are you afraid of, specifically?
- What are you sure of today that you suspect you will change your mind about?
- What would you do if you were certain it would work?
What comes next
- Where will you be living when this opens, and with whom?
- What will you have finished, and what will you have dropped?
- What do you want to ask the person reading this?
- What do you want them to forgive you for?
Where to keep the answers
On paper, the answers go in the capsule like anything else: pencil or pigment ink, acid-free paper, an envelope of their own. Our guide to making a physical capsule covers what survives.
Recorded answers are a different problem. A memory card sealed in a box depends on a machine that may not exist when the box is opened, and that is what a digital time capsule is for: you upload the video and voice files, choose the people and the date, and it unlocks by itself on the day.
One practical limit to plan around: a capsule has one owner, and only they can add files. For a class or a family, one person collects the recordings and uploads them before sealing.