Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be | Hacker News Reader

Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be

nytimes.com

89 pointslhh33 comments

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.

I'm curious how you'll feel about this comment in ten years.

That might be because, with distance (time), you can better separate your intentions from your actions, and see yourself from an external perspective.

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.

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?"

There's nothing like reading an archived thread, coming across some post where you go "who is the idiot that wrote this?", and it was yourself.

When I was 20, I looked back at realized 16-year-old me was a moron. At 24, I think the same thing about my 20-year-old self. I expect (and hope) that when I'm 28 I think I was an idiot at 24.

Mistakes are something you can resolve not to make today. In that sense, guessing your future self will call you a moron should inspire you not to be a moron.

But what actually changes are your values. Which is more subtly disturbing.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I have the same thing on the one side (looking at previous code), but at the same time, I realize I was younger, less experienced, learning, experimenting, etcetera. And at the same time I'm occasionally surprised by how my code actually looked neater than I thought it was, or how I still write some code the same way (i.e. haven't found a better way). And occasionally I read stuff and go "Hey, that was actually pretty clever of me, didn't know I knew that back then".

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.

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...), 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.

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.

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

(from 2002)

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/3/612.full

(from 2006)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17195878

(from 2013)

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/brain_basics/ninds_neuron...

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.

This is true, but I think it's a bit misleading. All of our generations of cells ever are always going to be functioning under the same genetic code, and our individual genetics are what serve as starting templates, or vague rule/condition sets of sorts for everything else. Mutations may arise here and there (if rarely), but DNA is really our fundamental thread of continuity as far as we know. What's to say that this similarly continuous notion of 'consciousness' we have isn't just some emergent property of our genetic code?

>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.

This presupposes that google and wikipedia contain an accurate description of how the world is today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

> 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, 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.

Not to mention how your appearance changes (for good or for bad), due to conscious effort, unconscious negligence, or external or unexpected influences, which can influence your personality and outlook on life significantly (for good or for bad).

Criticism: https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/do-we-really-...

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. :)

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pSt2gACrc

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

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.

Sounds like you've been reading The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Nørretranders

(Well worth it, if you haven't)

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".

"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...

One of my favorite short stories.

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.

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.

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

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