WE ALL CHANGE

At the extremes, there are two basic kinds of people (aren't there always): those who ravenously crave any change because their lives are terrible or boring, and those who hate and/or fear any change. 

I'm someone who usually resists change, because I feel most of it are superficial diversions that keep us from confronting and changing ourselves, as well as working to improve political and social realities. Development changes are more often than not negative, destroying the life-giving beauty of nature and artistic creation, solely for the purpose of personal profit, power, and ego gratification. Technological changes severely harms healthy human feeling and human communication, intellectual exploration, unique individual expression, and the vital critical standards painfully developed at great sacrifice over hundreds of years of movement towards a civilized planet.

This article suggests why we may not be able to see, plan for, react to, or accept change....

adapted from “New York Times”, 1/3/13  (by John Tierney)

WHY YOU WON’T BE THE PERSON YOU EXPECT TO BE

When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same, a team of psychologists said, describing research they conducted of people’s self-perceptions.

They call this the “end of history illusion,” in which people “underestimate how much they will change in the future.” Their research involved more than 19,000 people, ages 18 to 68. The illusion persists from teenage years into retirement.

Middle-aged people look back on our teenage selves with amusement and chagrin. We never realize that our future selves will look back and think the same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.

Psychologists said they were intrigued by the findings, published Thursday in the journal "Science", and were impressed with the amount of supporting evidence. 

Participants were asked about their personality traits and preferences — favorite foods, vacations, hobbies, bands — in the past and present, and then asked to make predictions for the future. Younger people reported more change in the previous decade than did older respondents.

But when asked to predict what their personalities and tastes would be like in 10 years, people of all ages consistently played down the potential changes ahead.

A 20-year-old woman’s predictions for her next ten years were not nearly as radical as a 30-year-old woman’s memory of how much she had changed in her 20s. This sort of discrepancy persisted among all respondents, even into their 60s.

The discrepancy was not because of faulty memory. People were much better at recalling their former selves, than at imagining how much they would change in the future.

One reason might be the well-documented tendency of people to overestimate their own wonderfulness.

Believing that we just reached the peak of our personal evolution makes us feel good. The ‘I wish that I knew then what I know now’ experience gives us a sense of satisfaction and meaning. But realizing how changeable our preferences and values are makes us doubt every decision and generates anxiety.

Predicting the future also requires more work than simply recalling the past. People confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change, with the unlikelihood of change itself.

People make decisions in their youth - about getting a tattoo, or choice of spouse - that they may later regret.

The end-of-history effect may represent failure of personal imagination. People tell complex dynamic stories about the past, but make vague future projections in which things stay the same.

Dr. McAdams, one of the co-authors of the study, remembered a conversation in the 1980s with his 4-year-old daughter, about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He told her they might not be her favorite some day, but she refused the possibility. Later, in her 20s, she confessed that some part of her 4-year-old mind realized he might be right.

“She resisted change, because she could not imagine what else she would ever substitute for the Turtles. So she insisted on continuity. Maybe this goes on with all of us.”