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

89 点作者 lhh将近 12 年前

13 条评论

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.

评论 #5931280 未加载

评论 #5931011 未加载

评论 #5932614 未加载

评论 #5931129 未加载

评论 #5931821 未加载

hawkharris将近 12 年前

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.

评论 #5936865 未加载

brianwillis将近 12 年前

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.

评论 #5930131 未加载

评论 #5933429 未加载

carbocation将近 12 年前

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.

danso将近 12 年前

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 (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html?pagewa...</a>), 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.

评论 #5929892 未加载

评论 #5931268 未加载

评论 #5933457 未加载

评论 #5930187 未加载

评论 #5931359 未加载

gwern将近 12 年前

Criticism: <a href="https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/do-we-really-underestimate-how-much-well-change-or-absolute-value-is-not-linear/" rel="nofollow">https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/do-we-really-...</a>

wwweston将近 12 年前

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将近 12 年前

Reminds me of this old Red vs. Blue PSA on tattoos:<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pSt2gACrc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pSt2gACrc</a>"Take your current age, now subtract 10 years from it. Were you smart back then?"

afriesh123将近 12 年前

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.

评论 #5930050 未加载

Melcher将近 12 年前

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".

md224将近 12 年前

"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:<a href="http://professorfloyd.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/onesheoncewasdol.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://professorfloyd.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/onesheonce...</a>One of my favorite short stories.

hcarvalhoalves将近 12 年前

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.

评论 #5932074 未加载

zdw将近 12 年前

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