In 2013, a team of Harvard scientists published results from a decade-long study on 19,000 people.
They uncovered a fundamental illusion that underlies the reason why we tend to feel "it's too late". Here's how understanding it can help us make big life changes.
The mystery of bad decisions
Dan Gilbert and his team noticed that people of all ages made consistently made bad decisions. Young adults paid to remove tattoos that teenagers paid to get, and middle-aged adults rushed to divorce the people who they once rushed to marry.
The study
They asked the question - Why do people consistently make decisions their future selves regret?
To find out, they asked people to predict how they thought their values, personalities, preferences, and hobbies would change in 10 years. They compared these to actual changes for every age.
The findings
They found three interesting things:
• At all ages, people's values changed significantly after a decade.
• The rate of change slowed down with age.
• But everyone grossly underestimated how much their values would change in a decade.
An 18 year old's predicted amount of change by the time he's 28, turns out to be equal to how much a 50 year old actually changes by the time he's 60.
The "End of History Illusion".
This is the illusion where people regard the present as the magic moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.
Regardless of age, people think who they are now is who they will be in the future.
This is really an illusion about time and how we see it differently looking forwards versus back.
"The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade."
Just think about what yourself 10 years ago was really like, and you'll probably find this to be true.
This illusion has consequences.
A search on Reddit's r/findapath subreddit with 250k+ members shows the End of History Illusion at play. Some recent threads from THIS WEEK:
- I'm 27, I don't enjoy my job but I feel too old to change my direction. Help?
- 35, out of ideas, low success in the job market.
- Panicking about not finding a path before 30 and wasting my life.
People feel trapped when they are objectively really young in their careers.
The solution
The counter mental model - every moment in life is a process. You're never finished, and you never arrive. The reframe here, is to know that one day you will look back on this moment and realize it was only the very beginning of a journey.
Dan Gilbert sums it up best:
"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.
The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change."
Resources
Dan Gilbert's Amazing Ted Talk