From: The New York Times
Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be
The New York Times:
When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same, a team of psychologists said Thursday, describing research they conducted of people’s self-perceptions.
They called this phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.” According to their research, which involved more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68, the illusion persists from teenage years into retirement.
“Middle-aged people — like me — often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”
Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Comments
I don’t know, I saw myself as an old man with athritis of the hands not being able to pick anything up… im 20..
It is a coincidence that on my birthday yesterday I was reflecting how every decade of my life since I am born had a different story than I wished to tell the world. My perception about myself and what I am capable of, the very self concept was so differently defined to my surprise, that I admit the limitations of my perception of self. My true self, if I may term so, seems more wiser to assert its full potential much more expansively, responding to environmental ande life context much much better than I would have perceived. I am 74 yrs and I want to say I am growing younger if my perception ought not to be so.
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