It’s like déjà vu all over again. ~Yogi Berra
Yep. That’s me in my fabulous Nehru tux getting ready for my prom date. I was about as spiffy then as spiffy could be. The tux was rented, but I had my regular Nehrus in the closet. They were next to my bell-bottoms, tie-dyes and 8-tracks.
What happened?
The Nehru went out of style around 11:55 p.m. the night of the prom and I had to hang on to my bell-bottoms and tie-dyes for about 30 years for them to come back around into fashion. The 8-tracks? They gave way to those newfangled cassettes.
How could I have been so wrong about the future of Nehrus and 8-tracks? Actually, when I think about it, I was wrong about a lot of things: The Afro perm I thought would look spectacular on me forever, the Beatles never breaking up, my best friend Kevin and I being pals for life, the Osborn 55-pound “portable” computer, and the 8-track tape player (which cost me a week’s salary) I had installed in my car. Naturally I thought my prom date would never change.
But in spite of my convictions at the time I was about as wrong as wrong could be. The good news is I am not alone.
Research recently reported on in the New York Times about a study on self-perception published in Science shows that individuals at every age and demographic make this kind of error: They call it the End of History Illusion because at each age we tend to underestimate the changes we will go through in the coming decade — even when we can point to all the changes we’ve been through in the last 10 years.
We think — somehow — that we have arrived at a more evolved plateau of being. We tend to think we are in a good enough place, perhaps even somewhat satisfied, and that things are not going to change that much. This builds on research that shows we do better at remembering who we were than predicting how much we will change. That brings us to the bad news.
I am (we are) about to do it all over again. Right now the chances are we are thinking the same thing about our future — we believe we are going to live, love and long for where, who, and what we are thinking about right now. But the research says it just ain’t so. This too is a transient state.
Professor Daniel Gilbert and postdoctoral fellow Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia studied over 19,000 participants ranging in age from 18 to 68 in an online questionnaire. Each phase of life group underestimates how much they are likely to change in the coming decade. In other words, the research demonstrated that at every age we describe more changes in the past 10 years than we would have predicted a decade ago.
According to Gilbert, “What these data suggest, and what scads of other data from our lab and others suggest, is that people really aren’t very good at knowing who they’re going to be and hence what they’re going to want a decade from now.”
How could this be? Mounting evidence indicates that we are influenced by what is happening to us now to the point that it creates a distortion of what we want and what will make us happy in the future. These findings were made popular by Daniel Gilbert’s bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness . He noted that there is a cognitive bias as to what makes us happy. This bias makes us predict very poorly what will make us happy in the future.
It is a hard pill to swallow. But the fact remains that we tend to make systematic mistakes about what is going to make us happy downstream. The advice? Don’t imagine your future. Use others’ experience to chart your course. We have lots of data about what people experience in different life stages. This is a more realistic guide to how you are going to feel once you have those experiences — not your own imagination of what it will be like. (In other words, hold off on that tattoo you were thinking of getting until you talk to someone who has had one for a while.)
Or you can simply remember the words of Yogi Berra: The future ain’t what it used to be.
Additional Reading
Quoidbach J., Gilbert, D.T., and Wilson, T.D. The End of History Illusion. Science 4 January 2013: 96-98. [DOI:10.1126/science.1229294]
4 comments
I think I’m an outlier, because I actually believe that I have very little idea where my life will be in a year. I base this on the fact that even right now things are nowhere like what I would have tried to predict a year ago, and a year ago nothing was like what I would have tried to predict two years ago. So I’ve stopped predicting. I think these rapid changes are fueled by access to the Web. Change seemed much slower before the 1990s.
Hopeful
you are not alone I have some wonderful moments as well as hardship, but I never want it to stay the same. I like change in fact I welcome it.
While the article is cute and funny, the bottom line really seems to be that we can’t predict the future! I can’t really think of any time in my life when I’ve wanted things to stay as they were-maybe I’m different from most, but I mainly just hoped things would improve and I didn’t really care that much how.
the frightening aspect of this phenomenon is that it gives rise to a dangerous, persistent arrogance about advances in knowledge and technology. Human beings seem to feel, perennially, that the current state is one in which we finally know ‘the truth’ about many things, including scientific theory and medicine. We always look back 30 years and shake our heads ruefully at how primitive our understanding was, and congratulate ourselves at how our modern knowledge has gotten the facts straight at last; and we have lost the fact that the last generation- that 30 years ago- felt exactly the same way about themselves and the generation before them.It is vitally important for the zeitgeist to include the fact that what we understand to be true is limited by the refinement of our investigative tools.A quick look at our understanding of the brain before and since the use of MRI, and the mind before and since fMRI, will provide a very good, recent example. While it is amusing to contemplate our experiences of the phenomenon as relates to style and popular culture, operating with the constant recognition that there is more twixt what we know and what there is to be known than is dreamt of would in many cases save a great deal of suffering, and not a few lives.