The psychology of your future self

Day 31 / 365

Why do people often regret the decisions they made in the past? Or to put it another way, why do we take decisions that our future selves tend to regret?

Take tattoos, for instance, it’s quite a big decision to get a tattoo. But if you talk to someone waiting at a tattoo removal clinic, they would definitely say how dumb they were 5 years ago when they chose to get the tattoo. You can say the same for marriages as well.

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made.

Dan Gilbert suggests this might be because of the inability of our minds to perceive how much we can change with time.

Our misconception of time

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

We always believe our present selves to be drastically different from what we were 10 years ago. Yet if we try to think of how much we’ll change in the next 10 years, we’ll probably have a hard time doing that.

Dan ran a study to test this. He asked a group of 28 years old how much certain aspects of their personalities have changed in the past 10 years. He asked another group of 18 years old how much they predict these aspects to change for them in the next 28 years.

logically we would expect to see a similar change in both cases. But surprisingly the 18 years old predicted way less change when they hit 28 than what the 28 years old actually experienced when going from 18 to 28.

This shows just how bad we are at predicting change, and how much we think that our present selves are permanent. But we must learn to face the fact, the one constant in our life is change.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Stop magnifying your fears in your mind