
Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be - lhh
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/science/study-in-science-shows-end-of-history-illusion.html
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JulianMorrison
Actually there's another effect, too - investigate your past self via evidence
rather than memory, and you'll find the memory has suspiciously shifted to
portray you as more like your present self than you were. I've found old
internet comments by me that nowadays I don't approve of at all.

~~~
Espressosaurus
Interestingly, looking back on my own internet history, I find I haven't
changed much.

For the most part, I don't regret my old comments; at worst they represent my
opinion based on what I then thought was the way the world worked.

I've been _wrong_ , but I'm human, and will continue getting things wrong.

~~~
dasil003
It's actually happened to me at least a few times that I'm reading an old blog
comment, read through it nodding my head the whole time as it precisely
describes my opinion, only to find my name at the bottom signed several years
ago :)

Of course it's also happened that I was saying to myself "who does this dick
think he is?"

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hawkharris
I've been following Daniel Gilbert's research on happiness for a few years.
His big finding — the idea that people often can't predict what will make them
happy — has changed the way I think about growing older.

When I was younger I used to feel like I had become mature enough to make life
predictions that would stand the test of time. Now I realize that my attitude,
outlook and preferences may change dramatically every year.

My goal for every birthday is simply to be able to look back at the past year
and poke fun at myself.

~~~
read
I like this goal! What's the best way you've found that helps poke fun at
yourself?

If I could ask, what kind of prediction about what will make you happy have
you been the most wrong about?

~~~
hawkharris
Haha. That's a great question. I try to poke fun at my predictions about
everything — from relationships to technology — but if I had to name the one I
was most wrong about, I'd point to a recent career-related prediction.

I enjoy writing, and a few years ago I stumbled on an awesome opportunity:
writing tech articles for MIT. I thought I was a great writer who knew a lot
about technology. I thought I'd be surrounding myself with other talented,
like-minded writers.

I realize in retrospect that this was an egotistical thought. Honestly,
writing for MIT made me feel stupid almost every day, but I learned to
appreciate not knowing. I felt happy approaching each day of the job as if I
were a student rather than pretending to know everything.

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brianwillis
Getting too obsessed with this can paralyze you though.

It's clear to me how cringe worthy some of my earlier work is, and that leads
me to think that I'll feel the same way in a few years time about the work I'm
doing now. This makes me reluctant to put myself and my work out there, which
makes it look like I don't get anything done, which is in many ways worse than
doing work that you later regret.

~~~
read
I've found the paralysis can have the opposite effect.

On several life-changing occasions it lead me to say to myself there's
something I'll never be able to do. As soon as I said that, I was able to have
stress-free thoughts my subconscious had not allowed me to have before.

The closest term I've found for this curious effect is: paradoxic intention.
You try to do the opposite of what you fear, exaggerating it to the point of
humor if possible.

Whatever the source of "history of illusion" is, paradoxic intention might be
its desired outcome. Or in simpler terms: you have to let go.

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carbocation
Guessing that you will remain who you currently are is probably the maximum
likelihood guess.

You probably are more satisfied with who you currently are than with any of
the other possible "yous" that you might envision. That's why you choose to be
who you are. (You might not like your station, but that involves things
outside of your locus of control.)

Therefore, there is not a different, preferred "you" that is trivial to
imagine. This makes predicting that you will remain the same seem, to me, to
be a good guess.

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danso
The OP is focused on the psychological aspect, but I'm also fascinated by how
much physiology plays a part in this. If it's true that your body is mostly
composed of cells just a decade old
([http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html?pagewa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html?pagewanted=all)),
then your body is _substantively_ different than it was the previous decade.
And yet, your mental state and memories, at least as you perceive it, seem to
be continuous.

But back to psychology and society: I wonder how much of this will change in
the age of Google and Wikipedia, when you can look up within seconds and find
with good certainty of how things were 10 years ago. And, with the persistence
of online data, your past may continually impact your life, day to day, in a
way that was never possible before in history. I suspect the responses by
participants in this study today may vary quite a bit from similar
participants 20 years from now.

~~~
kghose
Neurons do not divide in adulthood. There are some new neurons being born, but
the rate is low. I believe that the central nervous system neuron turn over is
much lower than the cells in the rest of the body.

However, neural connectivity and the hormone levels change as we age, which
probably changes our emotions and reactions and attitudes.

~~~
tokenadult
_Neurons do not divide in adulthood._

The idea that there is no neurogenesis in the adult brain is described as a
"myth" (a myth I certainly heard in childhood, as perhaps you have too) in
many sources I just looked up after seeing your comment. Did you have a
particular source in mind? Below are some that I found.

(from 2000, abstract)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11252770](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11252770)

(from 2002)

[http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/3/612.full](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/3/612.full)

(from 2006)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17195878](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17195878)

(from 2013)

[http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/brain_basics/ninds_neuron...](http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/brain_basics/ninds_neuron.htm)

~~~
kghose
Hi, yes. There is adult neurogenesis, occurring in certain brain regions.
However, this is not true for most of the central nervous system in humans.
Neurons (differentiated dells) do not divide. The few new neurons that are
born in adults come from special cells. I believe there is some work showing
that the ventricles have these neurogenesis zones.

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gwern
Criticism: [https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/do-we-
really-...](https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/do-we-really-
underestimate-how-much-well-change-or-absolute-value-is-not-linear/)

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wwweston
The biggest thing I've been surprised at post-30 is how much I have in common
with my past selves. Not that there's no differences I could point to, and not
that some of them wouldn't be surprising to past-me, but by and large, I'm
more the same than I thought I'd be.

I think I thought I'd be more like the middle-aged adults I had seen growing
up. They certainly didn't look like me, and seemed preoccupied with concerns
that were foreign to me.

Looking back, though, many of those in my age cohort also didn't look exactly
like me and seemed to have foreign concerns. :)

------
haberdasher
Reminds me of this old Red vs. Blue PSA on tattoos:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pSt2gACrc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pSt2gACrc)

"Take your current age, now subtract 10 years from it. Were you smart back
then?"

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afriesh123
Why stop with the person we expect to be? Who's to say we're the people we
think we are today? Or the person we think we were in the past? If self-
perception is biased, it has to be across the spectrum.

~~~
MaysonL
Sounds like you've been reading _The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down
to Size_ by Tor Nørretranders

(Well worth it, if you haven't)

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Melcher
I was surprised to read that people in the middle age spectrum don't expect to
change when they grow older? I guess I assumed that if you can identify that
you've changed drastically since you were in your youth than surely you should
be able to apply the same logic to your future self.

I would say this also hinges on the fact that when we're young we go through a
lot of quick bursts of change, think of yourself in grade school, high school,
etc. You grow quite substantially both physically and personally. That growth
slows down, you establish yourself, who you really are, you 'stick' with a
core group of friends in most cases and you generally, as people say, "settle
down".

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md224
"There ought to be an overriding self, she thinks, who, when she gets out of
hand, could slam the door and insist on no more changes until she can consider
the matter carefully and discuss it with some of the others. Instead she has
only this self, the one she is, and it seems to believe itself to be
overriding and final but is merely a memory of someone her future self once
knew."

\- Deb Olin Unferth, "One She Once Was"

Full Text:

[http://professorfloyd.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/onesheonce...](http://professorfloyd.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/onesheoncewasdol.pdf)

One of my favorite short stories.

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hcarvalhoalves
There's a brazilian rocker from the 70's who sang: "I prefer to be this
wandering metamorphosis / rather than having that same old opinion about
everything".

To change is to be alive, when you enter homeostatis it's when you start
dying. I know people who had an active life with good health and working up
into their 60's or 70's and died in a matter months after retiring.

~~~
flyinRyan
There could be many reasons for that. I would like to see the comparisons
between Americans life expectancy after retirement vs. Europeans (removing all
people who quickly start work again after retirement).

People who have stressful jobs and then go on long vacations often get sick
the first few days into it. It seems to me to be some kind of "stress dump" as
your body and mind begin to ease into a lower stress environment. In the US we
get such a small amount of vacation days, my personal (completely unchecked)
hypothesis is that when people retire they finally get to do that dump that
Europeans are doing once or more per year but the strain of a 60+ year dump is
too much for their bodies to handle.

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zdw
As far as "favorite things" go, TMNT (barring the movies) is a pretty good
choice.

