The End of History Illusion

November 3, 2023

How Our Personalities Change as Life Goes On

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfDvdYj0_fA
At every stage of life, people make decisions that profoundly influence the lives of the people they will become — and when they finally become those people, they aren’t always thrilled about it. Young adults pay to remove the tattoos that teenagers paid to get, middle-aged adults rush to divorce the people whom young adults rushed to marry, and older adults visit health spas to lose what middle-aged adults visited restaurants to gain. Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?
Multiple studies by Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson attempted to answer the question they posed in the 2013 Science article quoted above. Over 19,000 people participated. They concluded that people from 18 to 68 years of age underestimated how much they would change in the next ten years. Their traits, values, preferences for food and music, partners, and career choices all displayed vulnerability to these predictive mistakes. The authors called this tendency The End of History Illusion.  The time comes when we believe we are, more or less, a finished product. Our history of significant personality change has ended, so we think. We characterize ourselves as mature, self-aware, wise to the world’s ways, and if not fully developed, pretty close. We do not expect a noteworthy metamorphosis within our psyche despite the obvious transformation of our bodies. For example, most of us express unhappiness upon receiving a new driver’s license photo, thinking it is the most unflattering picture ever. That is until the license expires, and we get the current close-up only to realize the earlier one was attractive by comparison! In other words, we recognize the unappealing modifications in our physical state. Nonetheless, their implications for the future internal version of ourselves don’t occur to us. Our outsides get outsized attention. Some people do their best to prevent, minimize, or disguise the bodily decline before or after it happens. Health foods, diets, exercise, botox, cosmetic surgery, comb-overs, hair transplants, wigs, Viagra, etc. Without expecting significant alterations of the self inside our heads, we give little consideration to that part of our future. Decisions impacting the time ahead are determined with confidence. Thinking about an older self who is a near duplicate of our present version in his character, likes, and dislikes allows us to rest easy. As Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman used to say, “What, me worry?”

The authors of the Science article aren’t certain why we operate this way. One possibility is that since we believe our personalities are well-developed, change might be threatening. Most adults like themselves as they are, bolstering their personal security. A second explanation involves the difference between recognizing past changes and imaginatively envisioning times to come. The latter is harder to do. Because our future selves are unimaginable, we may confuse the difficulty of conjuring alterations with believing they won’t happen. The psychological defense of denial might help us understand the End of History phenomenon, as well. Telescoping ourselves into becoming not just older and different but less able or close to life’s end is unlikely to produce a smile. As noted, physical signs can sometimes be camouflaged. The “out of sight, out of mind” form of denial assists more than a few to live with less distress. The dilemma and the opportunity we are left with is this: Rather than conceiving ourselves as near the end of the change process, we can think of our being as an endless work in progress. Acceptance of this encouraging news allows us to improve and fulfill who we are. We can learn how to live better, enjoy and repair the world as needed, benefit from more self-knowledge, and grow wiser and happier. Our job is to look backward and forward as we reach within to unfold, open, and refine the best of our God-given talents to become what is possible for us. Ever creating, revising, and recreating. In a coming post, I will offer suggestions on how this might be done.
April 23, 2023

How Much Do You Think You Will Change in Ten Years?

Ask a 28-year-old if he is mature; he will likely say yes. At a certain point in life, we believe we have learned most of the essential lessons. One can imagine our personalities are formed, and our values are secure. They will endure.

Nope.

Three psychologists published an important paper (describing six experimental studies employing psychological tests) focusing on our illusions regarding the degree to which time will reshape us.

For example, they asked 28-year-olds how much they believed they would change in the next ten years. In contrast, they asked a group aged 38 how much they had changed in the last decade. The groups were similar but for their ages.

When they compared the two, the first bunch predicted they would alter a modest amount. However, the older segment recognized they’d shifted more than expected in the identical period.

The experimenters looked at individuals between 18 and 68, obtaining the same results. The study included over 19,000 subjects.

Quidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson claimed this is an illusion to which humanity is subject. Indeed, they called their paper “The End of History Illusion.” We think of ourselves as fixed in place as we are, a more or less permanent version of the one who goes by our name. The big transformations in our life exist as a remembered past, so we think.

What does this tell us?

The strawberry ice cream you love today might be cast aside down the road.

More seriously, we can tap memory to capture the extent of previous modifications to our nature but ignore or forget such knowledge when considering the rest of the journey.

Given that the findings point to underestimating the metamorphosis over the horizon, they may result from not wishing to consider what the unknowable tomorrow might bring.

Fear of change applies to a segment of life experience for many of us.

Consider this as well. If you make unexpected changes in values, preferences, or personality, the same might be true of friends, lovers, or others. Such an idea anticipates a precarious existence without a clear path to make oneself ready for it.

If one expects the coming incarnation of each of us to be like the present (except for minor personal shifts), our plans shall be off the mark. But how can we do better when we lack a crystal ball?

Every human soul can try to control his behavior, education, and decisions for now, but not for the person he will become. The bucket list items of today need to be fulfilled while they still matter.

By the time you retire, you could be someone whose interests and tastes have traded places with those of the new guy, whoever he is.

Even so, humans are adaptable. They adjust to the prevailing conditions and move toward a set point — a built-in grade of life satisfaction. At a practical level, life’s ups diminish after their moment of buoyancy, while the downs hit the floor, and we usually bounce back to some approximation of where we started.

Though we underestimate the manner and scope of our change, we are created to last through whatever those differences amount to.

Since the image in the mirror, inside and out, won’t be the same for long, perhaps the best advice is this:

We are all in transit. Use the time to improve, repair the world, enjoy the moment, and make the most of it.

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The authors of the paper mentioned in this essay were Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson. It was published in the January 4, 2013 edition of Science, Volume 339, Issue 6115.

Both of the above images are the work of Laura Hedien, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website. The first is the Chicago River, from the end of December 2022. The second is an Antarctic Sunset, photographed in November 2022.