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 Sciencearticle 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.
