Can We Know Our Future Selves?
What I watched: “You Don’t Actually Know What Your Future Self Wants” by Shankar Vedantam. Presented at TED. Posted October 24, 2022.
In my notes app were about four or five other topics about which I wanted to write for my next post, but then this TED Talk popped into my feed. Shankar Vedantam’s powerful talk metaphorically clubbed me on the head to attention making me realize his message is perhaps one of the most important universal truths we must all accept.
The video delivers such an important message about how we all change over time, sometimes in rather dramatic ways. I was compelled to write about it.
If the 68-year old me could come face-to-face with the 21-year old me, myself at 21 would be shocked at the directions and paths I’ve taken throughout my life. I’ve repeatedly changed careers, jobs, interests picked up and some dropped, views on spirituality and theism, and so much more. I’m essentially an entirely different person than I was in my youth.
Vedantam tells the story of when he was 12 years old and fractured his foot playing soccer, the game he loved so much back then. He deceived his father about his injured foot long enough to see a movie about soccer he was looking forward to. Afterward his father took him to an orthopedist who put his foot in a cast.
Soccer was so important to Vedantam in his youth. Today? Now he’s far more fascinated with American-style football. Were his 12-year old self to encounter him today, his younger self would see his older self’s love of American football to be a betrayal.
Vedantam recounts other instances of his older self embarking on interests, careers, and other things that ran entirely counter to what his younger self envisioned his future might become, the person he might become.
We think we know what our future is going to be, but we don’t. Not really. The future is unknowable. Always. Think of how we and society have changed as we’re emerging from the Covid pandemic. The pandemic changed most of us. It certainly changed me.
But there is a paradox here and the paradox is when we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become. But when we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we're going to be the same people in the future.
I write a lot about some of the things that will change all of our futures. For example, climate change, artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics. These advancements (assuming you consider them advancements) are and will change all of our lives in massive ways we can’t begin to fully comprehend today.
We might think we know what the world of 10, 15, or 25 years in the future will look and function like, but we don’t actually know. We can’t know. We also can’t know who we’ll be in the future despite any self-assurances we might believe today.
Vedantam has named the phenomenon that we don’t realize how drastically we change over time the illusion of continuity.
But we don't imagine that we ourselves would have different perspectives different views, different preferences in the future. I call this the illusion of continuity. And I think one reason this happens is that when we look backwards, the contrast with our prior selves to who we are today is so clear, we can see it so clearly that we have become different people. When we look forward, we can imagine ourselves being a little older, a little grayer. But we don't imagine fundamentally that we're going to have a different outlook or a different perspective, that we're going to be different people.
Then, Vedantam hammers home how vital understanding this universal truth is. The future changes we’re all going to experience seem incomprehensible and amorphous today, but the illusion of continuity has profound consequences for all aspects of our lives, from the trivial to the vital.
Vedantam tells the story of a woman, a nurse who had seen lots of sickness in her profession, who repeatedly proclaimed to her husband that if she was ever diagnosed with a terminal illness that she did not want any heroic medical measures done that might prolong her suffering. Quality of life was more important to her than quantity. Or so she thought at the time.
Many years later the woman was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), an incurable and eventually fatal disease. The woman lives her life in whatever ways she can to best experience joy as she awaits the end when her body will no longer be able to breathe on its own.
Eventually the woman gets much sicker and ends up facing the decision of whether to be put on a ventilator to help her breathing. To the husband’s astonishment, his wife says yes. That decision ran contrary to every conversation the two of them had up to that point about such end-of-life decisions.
Many of us have, or should have, advance medical directive forms completed and signed should we be faced with the horrible decision a loved one might have to make whether we are kept alive through extreme measures or left to die naturally. I have one in place. I’m glad I do. That said, even an important decision like that is projecting into the future how we might feel about such a situation. We’re imperfect as predictors of future sentiments.
The obvious wisdom of having advance medical directives in place aside, the younger woman might as well have been a stranger making such an important life or death decision. We are all strangers to our future selves. All of us.
Vedantam then invokes the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment philosophers have engaged in for many years.
As decades progressed, parts of Theseus’ ship rotted and decayed and so had to be replaced. Planks were replaced one after another until one day every part of the ship was constructed of new material. Plato and other philosophers asked if every part of the ship is new, is it still the Ship of Theseus?
You and I are walking examples of the Ship of Theseus. Our cells turn over all the time. The people you were 10 years ago are not the people you are today. Biologically, you have become a different person.
But I believe something much more profound happens at a psychological level. Because you could argue a ship is not just a collection of planks, a body is not just a collection of cells. It's the organization of the planks that make the ship. It’s the organization of the cells that make the body. If you preserve the organization, even if you swap planks in and out, or cells in and out, you still have the ship, you still have the same body.
But at a psychological level, each new layer that's put down is not identical to the one that came before it. The famous plasticity of the brain that we've all heard so much about means that on an ongoing basis you are constantly becoming a new person. This has profound consequences for so many different aspects of our lives.
Vedantam sets aside the philosophical questions for a moment and suggests this problem has some practical challenges for us. We promise something today, such as loving someone forever, but that promise is being made by a future self that is a stranger. Same for our views and perspectives about many things.
We might as a society believe locking people up and throwing away the key is a good way to blunt crime or seek justice, but perhaps we’ll collectively feel different in the future about our need for retribution or vengeance.
Look at some of the laws we’ve had in the past that today seem absurd, racist, or misogynistic. Every country over time changes their laws because even though when laws were originally crafted they made sense to the people of that time, today or in the future they might seem antiquated or unconscionable.
And all of these examples stem from the same problem which is that we imagine that we represent the end of history. That the future is only going to be more of the same.
Vedantam then doles out three pieces of advice to mitigate the fact that we spend so much of our lives trying to make our future and unknowable selves happy. The advice can be briefly summarized as remain curious, practice humility, and be brave.
Remain curious because you should play an active part in creating the person you are to become. That’s best accomplished by curating your future self by spending time with all types of people, pursuing a variety of avocations and professions, and generally expanding your horizons to better prepare your future self for options.
Practice humility because when we express views or opinions with unwavering certitude, the people with whom we might today disagree might be our future selves. This applies to people, but also to organizations.
Be brave because despite future issues of age and physical and mental capabilities, our future selves will also have capacities, strength, and wisdom that we do not today possess.
Such great advice. Profound advice. I plan to the best of my ability to stay curious, practice humility, and be brave. I am doing so because I do not want to look back on my present self with any resentment or bewilderment. I want to look back and say to myself “Race, you did the best you could to become the current you.” I hope the same for you.
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