Gilbert points out that at every stage of our lives, we make decisions that profoundly affect our future lives, but it's hard to be happy with the decisions we've made in the past when we become that future self. For example, young people spend a lot of money to get rid of tattoos that cost a lot of money when they were teenagers. The middle-aged man is anxious to divorce the young man who cannot wait to get married. The old people worked hard to squander the money they earned as middle-aged people. There's no end. Gilbert wondered: why do we make decisions we often regret in the future? The 1, 000 survey shows that people's values have changed more in 10 years than you might think. Dan Gilbert conducted a massive survey of thousands of people. They asked half of them to predict how much their values would change over the next decade. Let the other person tell us how much their values have changed over the last 10 years. In its database, people in every age range from 18 to 68 greatly underestimate how much they will experience over the next decade.
Open baidu App to see more meitu
The light purple line represents respondents' estimates of their own changes over the next decade. The yellow lines show respondents looking back at their actual changes over the past decade. In contrast, the gap between the two shows that people always underestimate their actual changes. Gilbert named this phenomenon as the illusion of "the end of history". In fact, he points out, life turning points that affect people happen "now," and people often struggle with what they want right now when they make decisions.
But because people lack the imagination for time, they don't make good decisions. Because, over time, not only does one's values change, but so does everything else. For example, personality. Even basic preferences change, such as what kind of vacation you like best, what kind of hobby you like best, and what kind of music you like best. Let half of them tell us, "do you think this will change in the next 10 years?" Let the other half tell us, "has this changed in the last decade?" What the study found: people speculated that their current friends would be their friends for the next 10 years, and that their favorite vacation spot would be their favorite place for the next 10 years. However, people 10 years older will say, "well, you know, it's really different." Why do people in the process of development and change mistakenly think that they will never change? Gilbert isn't sure why. This, he argues, may be related to the difficulty of memory and imagination.
Most of us can remember what we were like 10 years ago, but it's hard to imagine who we will be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to think, it's unlikely to happen. In short, time is a powerful force. It changed our preferences. It reshaped our values. It changes our personality.
For most of us, the present is a magical moment, a watershed moment on the timeline. It's a moment that makes us ultimately who we are. You are in a state of transition, of transience, of transience. Like all the old you.
