Psychologist Dan Gilbert, who you may recognize from retirement commercials, gives a short (6:40) but interesting TED Talk on the end-of-history illusion.
Essentially, people underestimate how much they will change in the future. While it’s true that our rate of change slows as we age, this phenomenon (anticipating that we will change less in the next decade than we actually do) holds true for all ages. It’s true for our values, personalities, and even our tastes (likes and dislikes).
Why is this so? Probably two reasons:
- At any point in life we think we’ve “arrived” in our development
- It’s much easier to see how we’ve changed in hindsight than it is to imagine how we’ll be in the future.
As Gilbert puts it in concluding:
The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It’s as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It’s a watershed on the timeline. It’s the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change.
So here’s to change . . . and growth.