At first I thought that, since this article is from the BBC, it might be about arrogant westerners realizing the world doesn’t revolve around them. But no, it is about the idea of a person’s personality changing over time, and how you might take that into account when making decisions today.
To test whether the end of history illusion would extend to people’s personal values, the researchers recruited a new sample of 2,700 participants, who were asked to state the importance of concepts such as hedonism, achievement, tradition in their lives – before imagining their responses 10 years in the past or 10 years in the future. Sure enough, the end-of-history illusion was in full force: people recognised how their values had shifted in the past but were unlikely to predict change in the future…
“Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain,” the researchers concluded in their original paper. “History, it seems, is always ending today…”
More seriously, the end-of-history illusion could place us on career paths that fail to give us fulfilment in the long-term. You might have considered that a high salary was more important than inherent interest in the work you were doing – and that could well have been true at the time. When you reached your 30s, however, those values might have shifted – now you might be yearning for passion rather than an enormous pay packet. “Here’s the problem: when faced with new career directions or job prospects, if we make mistakes in considering what we think will matter, we may opt to take (or not take) paths that we’ll later regret,” Hershfield notes.
BBC
If I think about a “bucket list” I might have made when I was younger, it might have included things like living abroad, starting a business, and skydiving. I have done one of those three things at this point, and I am no longer interested in the other two. If I were making a new bucket list today, it would still include some periodic travel, but with long stretches at a “home base” that is comfortable and predictable. I think it is always useful to try to imagine a “future you” looking back on a decision. Maybe we should be imagining two or three “future yous” and trying to make decisions they might all agree on.
Right now, I feel like I could spend a month or a year just sitting around reading books and maybe emerge as a whole human being ready for social contact again. But that is from years and years of overstimulation from work and family life with virtually no breaks. So that is one question I have, is our personality on any given day an “equilibrium” personality or is it partially a reflection of what has happened to us recently. I might not be classified as a “neurotic” person the first day after I get back to work after vacation, and then I might seem extremely neurotic on the second day depending on what is thrown at me at work and at home by other neurotic people and how much (okay, to be realistic, whether I get any) down time in between. Maybe, just maybe, my work and family life will calm down as I get older and my equilibrium personality will be able to shine.