Would Your Younger Self Be Proud?

"Would a younger version of yourself be proud of the person you have become? If not, it's not too late."
(from my tweets, 2014)

It's a short tweet, but it holds a big question. It asks you to stand in two places at once: as the person you are now, and as the person you used to be, looking forward at who you would become.

It's a question psychologists have studied in surprising depth. How we relate to our past and future selves turns out to shape our choices, our sense of progress and even our happiness. And the second half of the tweet, "it's not too late," may be the most important part.

We think we're done changing

In 2013, Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson surveyed more than 19,000 people between the ages of 18 and 68. They asked some people how much their personality, values and preferences had changed over the past ten years. They asked others how much they expected to change over the next ten.

At every age, people predicted they would change much less in the future than people of that age said they had changed in the past. The researchers called this the end of history illusion. We recognize how much we've grown, but we tend to assume that the person we are today is more or less final.

That's good news for anyone whose answer to my question is "not yet." If the research is right, you will probably change more than you expect. The person you'll be in ten years isn't fixed.

We see progress by looking back

Psychologists Anne Wilson and Michael Ross found another pattern in 2001. People tend to judge their past selves more harshly than their present selves, even when nothing much has changed. In their studies, people described earlier versions of themselves less favorably, and the further back they looked, the more critical they became. They titled their paper "From chump to champ."

They argued that this helps us feel that we've grown. Looking back at a less capable past self makes the present self look better.

That's a useful thing to know when you ask my question. Your younger self might be prouder of you than you think, because you're probably underrating how far you've come.

Our future self can feel like a stranger

Psychologist Hal Hershfield has spent years studying how people relate to their future selves. In a 2009 brain-imaging study with Elliott Wimmer and Brian Knutson, people thought about their present selves, their future selves ten years ahead, and other people. For many participants, brain activity when thinking about their future self looked more like thinking about someone else than thinking about themselves. People whose future self seemed more distant were also less willing to wait for larger rewards.

In another study, Hershfield and colleagues showed people digitally aged images of their own faces. Afterward, people chose to set aside more money for retirement. Seeing their future self more clearly made them want to take better care of that person.

Writing about your best possible self

Psychologist Laura King found a simple way to put this to work. In a 2001 study, she asked students to write for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, about their "best possible self": a future in which everything had gone as well as it could, and they had achieved their goals.

Compared with people who wrote about other topics, the best-possible-self writers reported better mood right afterward. Several months later, they had also made fewer visits to the health center for illness.

What the philosophers said

The British philosopher Derek Parfit made the strangeness of future selves central to his book Reasons and Persons (1984). He argued that what matters about our survival is the psychological connection between our present and future selves: memories, intentions, values and character. And those connections, he noted, weaken over time. In an important sense, the person you'll be in thirty years is connected to you less closely than the person you'll be tomorrow.

Hershfield has cited Parfit's work as an inspiration. But the practical lesson cuts both ways. If our future selves are partly strangers, we can still choose to treat them kindly, and to become people our younger selves would recognize and admire.

Some honest caveats

Some of these findings are about how people see themselves, not objective change. The end of history study relied on self-reports. The brain-imaging study was small. The best-possible-self exercise has been tested many times since 2001, and reviews suggest its effects on well-being are real but modest.

Still, they point the same way: we are more changeable than we feel, and we can shape who we become.

How to answer your younger self

• Ask the question honestly. Picture yourself at 10, 15 or 20. What would that person admire about you? What would disappoint them?
• Count your progress. You may be underestimating how far you've come. Write down three ways you've grown.
• Write about your best possible self. Spend 20 minutes imagining your life ten years from now, if things go well.
• Make your future self vivid. Write a letter to yourself in ten years, or imagine what that person would thank you for.
• Remember it's not too late. If the research is right, you have more change ahead of you than you think.

Today's reflection

Would a younger version of you be proud of the person you've become? If not, what is one thing you could start this week that they would be proud of?

Sources

• Ersner-Hershfield, H., Wimmer, G. E., & Knutson, B. (2009). Saving for the future self: Neural measures of future self-continuity predict temporal discounting. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(1), 85–92.
• Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23–S37.
• King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798–807.
• Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press.
• Quoidbach, J., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2013). The end of history illusion. Science, 339(6115), 96–98.
• Wilson, A. E., & Ross, M. (2001). From chump to champ: People's appraisals of their earlier and present selves. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(4), 572–584.