Future Shock

Sometimes you hear a divorcing couple say, “we just didn’t grow the same way; we became different somehow.” Or you listen to a retirement speech where a career path zigzagged with nothing but unexpected turns. Despite the fact that the technology and economic climate of today bears little or no resemblance to the world of our youth – and we don’t expect it to be static – people at all ages have pretty linear expectations of what their lives will be like many years into the future… and they are almost always they are wrong.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert (Harvard) and his collaborators, Jordi Quoidbach (Harvard) and Timothy D. Wilson (University of Virginia) have conducted a massive study see how people’s expectations at various ages jibe with the reality of their lives. Their report (The End of History Illusion) was released on January 4^th in Science Magazine. Their own abstract: “We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This ‘end of history illusion’ had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences.”

We wouldn’t be shocked that younger people report more change than their elders, but lifetime disillusionment and change were pervasive. Folks also remember more about how they were, but their memories aren’t nearly as clear as to what they thought they would become. “And the discrepancy did not seem to be because of faulty memories, because the personality changes recalled by people jibed quite well with independent research charting how personality traits shift with age. People seemed to be much better at recalling their former selves than at imagining how much they would change in the future.

“Why? Dr. Gilbert and his collaborators… had a few theories, starting with the well-documented tendency of people to overestimate their own wonderfulness… ‘Believing that we just reached the peak of our personal evolution makes us feel good,’ Dr. Quoidbach said. ‘The ‘I wish that I knew then what I know now’ experience might give us a sense of satisfaction and meaning, whereas realizing how transient our preferences and values are might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.’… Or maybe the explanation has more to do with mental energy: predicting the future requires more work than simply recalling the past. ‘People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself,’ the authors wrote in Science.” New York Times, January 4^th.

It’s a lesson that everyone should learn, the younger the better, but it seems to fly in the face of who we are as human beings. Maybe it’s the motivation that moves us to the “next” or a protection that lets us accept where we are with less pain. Whatever the reason, it takes an incredible maturity to realize how completely we really to change, to plan for that with earlier decisions that maintain maximum flexibility and to accept the process. But then, try telling that to a teenager hell bent on that cool new tattoo.

I’m Peter Dekom, and failed expectations explain a lot of what is happening in the world.