Title: Psychology of future self
Speaker: Dr Dan Gilbert
Duration: 6.5 min
Main point: We underestimate how different we will be 10 years from now, and thus can make bad decisions for our future selves.
Below are my notes for/from the above video
Why do we make decisions today that our future selves so often regret?
Because we vastly underestimate how much change we will experience over the next 10 years. Our values, our personalities, our favourite friend, favourite vacation, favourite hobby, favorite music: it all changes more than we expect, no matter how old we are today.
We have an illusion that our personal history has come to an end, and that we have just become the people we were always meant to be, and will be for the rest of our lives. This is the End of History Illusion.
We overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability. This is probably due to the ease of remembering vs the difficulty of imagining. We can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it difficult to imagine who we are going to be in 10 years. But when we can’t imagine something, it’s probably due to our weak imagination, not because change won’t/can’t happen.
Time is a powerful force. It reshapes our values, transforms our preferences and alters our personalities. We only appreciate this in retrospect. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. Change is the only constant.
Eve’s comment: This hit hard. If I think back on who I was 10 years ago, there is no way I could have imagined me being who I am now. So it’s interesting to project that into the future and accept that no matter how well I plan my life, I will be a very different Eve in 2034 than I am in 2024. Want to be the best version of yourself? Then read this next:
To think about: How does this play with the Power of Now?