End of History Illusion
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At age 25, many of us believe ourselves to be wise, learned, and informed.
This perception isn’t the result of arrogance, but rather a sense that we’ve lived such immense lives already. Having learned what we’ve learned and done what we’ve done, we have every reason to believe that what comes next will be an extension of what we’re experiencing in that moment.
The reality, of course, is that we continue to have new revelations, new educational experiences, new perception-shifts, and new personality-altering revolutions. Our habits change, our relationships change, our ambitions and energy levels and ideologies continue to iterate and evolve.
The End-of-History Illusion refers to this tendency to assume—seemingly logically, in the moment—that who we are now is the true representation of who we were meant to become, and our current views, understandings, and ambitions are an apex for all these things, and will thus continue to shape our actions and beliefs for the rest of our lives.
It’s thought that this illusion, which is common and evident in people of all ages, is the result of our inclination to distinguish who we are now from who we were, previously, but to be less capable of distinguishing our present selves from our future selves.
This forecasting failure may be the consequence of how difficult it is to foresee the variables that spark the internal changes we experience over the course of our lives.
Traveling to another country, for instance, can open your eyes to all kinds of things that you never would have perceived had you stayed put, but which are blindingly obvious in the aftermath of that experience.
If you had tried to imagine those same revelations before taking that trip, however, it’s unlikely you would have come to the same conclusions or changed your mind, your perception, in the same way. That adjustment in perspective was a necessary catalyst for your change in mindset, just as the variables you’ll encounter in the future—about which you currently know nothing, and cannot predict with any accuracy—will serve as triggers for the changes that will define who you are ten years from now.
Interestingly, research has also shown that no matter how old we get and no matter how aware we are of the changes we’ve undergone in the past, our forecasts of future changes remain inaccurate.
It’s difficult to measure these sorts of changes objectively, but even older folks who’ve had the chance to see such changes occur over and over again tend to be surprised by the extent of the changes they experience compared to what they assumed—though results and outcomes vary, depending on how this perception of change is measured, who does the measuring, and what metrics are used to gauge that perception/reality gap.
This illusion also seems to scale up to how we behave as groups.
It’s difficult for our societies to collectively imagine how the fundamental precepts of our governments might shift over time, for instance, just as it’s difficult to forecast how a change in some environmental factor—like climate change, or in how we generate energy or communicate or entertain ourselves—might, in turn, change the way we behave, believe, and/or what we prioritize.
It’s likely that primordial human beings, asked to imagine the best of all possible futures, would envision a world in which the dangers of their day were ameliorated and in which they had unlimited quantities of meat and bananas. They wouldn’t be capable of dreaming up the technologies, social structures, and capabilities we contemporary humans might desire, asked the same question.
Modern humans are just as limited by our context, though, and there’s a very good chance that our current aims and ideas will seem just as quaint to our descendants, when they look back at our behaviors, beliefs, and ambitions from the lofty perspective of one hundred, or perhaps even just ten years in the future.
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