Ask a group of young children what they want to be when they grow up and you will hear firefighters, doctors, maybe the occasional paleontologist or astronaut. What you almost certainly will not hear is accountant or plumber. And yet somehow, we end up with plenty of both, along with the firefighters and doctors and a thousand other professions nobody saw coming. Children are not unique in this. Adults are surprisingly bad at predicting who their future selves will become. We are remarkably good at looking backward at who we were. We are far less reliable at looking forward at who we will be. Psychologists call this the End-of-History Illusion, and it shows up nowhere more clearly than in how we plan for retirement.

In 2013, psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson published a landmark study in Science that surveyed more than 19,000 people between the ages of 18 and 68. They divided participants into two groups: reporters, who recalled how much their personality, values, and preferences had changed over the past ten years, and predictors, who estimated how much they expected to change over the next ten years. The pattern was consistent across every age group. People of all ages reported significant change looking backward and predicted almost none looking forward. At 25, at 45, at 65, the present self consistently felt like the final version. The researchers called it the End-of-History Illusion: the tendency to recognize our past as a story of change while treating our present as a permanent destination.

A simple exercise illustrates the point. Think back ten years. For me, 2016 looked nothing like today. I was in a different career, living in a different region of the country, with kids who were 4 and 8 years old. Almost nobody on earth had heard the word coronavirus. Today I am in a new career, in a new state, with a college student and a high school freshman, and we all carry the memory of a global pandemic. The world changed. I changed with it. Now apply the same exercise forward. Who will you be in 2036? If you are like most people, and the research suggests you are, you are probably imagining a version of yourself that looks a lot like who you are today, with a few adjustments around the margins. The research says you are almost certainly wrong.

The End-of-History Illusion shows up clearly in retirement planning. When people plan for retirement, especially when that retirement is five or more years away, they tend to build plans around the person they are right now. They assume they will have the same interests, the same energy levels, the same social circles, the same sense of what a fulfilling day looks like. Research shows that people are most likely to underestimate the impact that changes in their social lives will have on their wellbeing and adjustment in retirement. The financial plan gets careful attention. The identity plan, who you will actually be when you get there, rarely does. And yet that second question may be the more important one.

The person who retires at 62 is not the same person who started planning at 52. Their health may have changed. Their friendships have evolved or faded. Their children have grown and moved. Their relationship to work, what it gave them beyond a paycheck, may only become clear once it is gone. None of this means retirement planning is futile. It means the plan needs to account for a self that is still in progress.

The most useful thing you can do is resist the urge to build a fixed picture of who your retired self will be, and instead seek out people who are already living the version of retirement you aspire to. Not to copy their path, but to see what the terrain actually looks like from someone who is standing in it. A mentor who is five or ten years into retirement, whose values and energy and sense of purpose you admire, offers something no financial plan can: a real data point about what changes, what stays, and what surprised them most. Your future self is still being built. The wisest thing you can do is stay curious about who they will turn out to be.

Three questions worth sitting with this week:

1.    Think back ten years. What did you believe was permanent about yourself that has since changed completely?

2.    What decisions are you making today that assume your current values, preferences, and priorities are fixed?

3.    If your future self will look back at today the same way you look back at ten years ago, what might they wish you had left more room for?

Three things worth your time this week:

📚  Read

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert — the book by one of the study’s authors. Gilbert’s central argument is that humans are surprisingly bad at predicting what will make them happy in the future, not because they are irrational, but because the future self they are imagining does not yet exist. A natural companion to this issue and one of the most readable psychology books available.

🧠  Concept worth knowing

Affective forecasting — the psychological term for predicting how you will feel about future events. Research consistently shows that people overestimate both the intensity and the duration of future emotional states. The End-of-History Illusion is a specific form of this: we cannot accurately predict our future selves because we cannot simulate the experiences that will shape them.

📊  Stat worth sharing

In the original 2013 study published in Science, Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson surveyed more than 19,000 people ranging in age from 18 to 68. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all reported having changed significantly in the past and all predicted they would change relatively little in the future. The illusion does not fade with age or experience. It appears to be a feature of how humans experience time itself.

Zoom out. See what’s possible.

— Chuck

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SOURCES

Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson — “The End of History Illusion,” Science, January 4, 2013: science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1229294
Overview and explainer: nesslabs.com/end-of-history-illusion
Retirement social identity research — Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2024: bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joop.12458
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert: amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/1400077427
Affective forecasting overview: behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/affective-forecasting/