We’re kind of terrible at it.
According to Dan Gilbert,
At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the “end of history” illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do.
Dan Gilbert, from The Psychology Of Your Future Self (TED)
It seems almost futile to try to take the “end of history” illusion into effect in decision making – by definition, I can’t predict my own future, so why try?
And yet, I try to let this concept inform my day-to-day behavior. I might not know who I’ll be in 10 years, but I can appreciate who I am today. I might not be able to predict who my students will grow into, but I can celebrate their growth and do my best to help guide the inevitable change.
I might not be able to anticipate the future, but I will make every decision trusting that I am on the right path.