The Folly of Predicting Our Future

All of us experience certain biases and errors in our thinking that can lead to less-than-ideal decisions and faulty life predictions.

What I read: “Hack to the future: How to conquer your ‘projection bias’” by Kevin Dickinson. Published May 1, 2024.

There are all kinds of biases that each of us experience regularly whether we realize it or not. Kevin Dickinson’s article leads with one that’s certainly been present in my life – projection bias. Wikipedia describes it this way.

The tendency to overestimate how much one's future selves will share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.

In Dickinson’s article, he describes projection bias this way.

Like other cognitive biases, projection bias represents a systematic error in our thinking. Specifically, it occurs when we mistakenly believe that our future selves will share the same tastes and preferences as our present selves. In doing so, we discount just how much our appetites can fluctuate and change.

Wow. When I read that, it struck home. For me, projection bias is why so much of my planning for the future has failed miserably. I’d make plans for 5 or 10 years in the future only to be an entirely different person 5 or 10 years later with different needs, interests, and passions.

I wrote about my struggles with constant goal making and subsequent failure to reach those goals in “Stop Dangling Carrots.”

It’s not like I haven’t accomplished things throughout the years. I’ve done a lot. I feel good about that. But when I step back from what I’ve done I realize that few of the accomplishments to which I can point to and be proud of or feel deeply fulfilled by came about with a goal or plan in mind.

Increasingly I’m reading articles that counter the prevailing notion that specific, rigid goals are always helpful. The pervasive self-help narrative about setting goals and how to achieve them is crumbling around the reality that it simply doesn’t work for many people. Life’s not a linear path. Life is lived via twists and turns, not straight-line trajectories to the goals we set.

Projection bias is one of the main reasons why my goal-making efforts so often failed to result in the desired outcomes.

While our tastes and preferences certainly change over time, Dickinson points out that the trio of economists who first formalized the concept of projection bias suggest those changes can lead to bad outcomes because we fail to foresee the magnitude of our taste and preference changes.

Dickinson uses a relatable example of shopping while hungry to illustrate how much we overbuy when we shop for food while in a hungry state. That’s certainly been the case for my grocery store shopping excursions.

We’re more likely to buy all sorts of things when our purchase takes place within a certain mindset or environment at the time. Americans’ rabid consumer habits often stem from such projection bias decisions. But it’s not just the economic impacts that demonstrate the risk of projection bias. Projection bias contributes to what psychologists call affective forecasting.

Put simply, affective forecasting is the ability to predict one’s future emotional state. It sounds helpful, but it’s unfortunately not the sharpest blade in our mental toolboxes. In fact, our forecasts typically flop.

We make decisions within certain contexts. How much sleep we’ve had. The weather. What our friends find important. Our overall mood or health. There is an abundance of contexts in which we navigate through life and each of them contributes to the stew of the moment in which we make decisions about the future.

Whatever heightened emotions exist in the moments when we make decisions are likely to dissipate over time. That can result in another bias, impact bias, which Wikipedia describes this way.

The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

This is why I undertake a daily practice to review each day my overall short- and long-term objectives and tasks so that they’re constantly reviewed, reassessed, and recalibrated to align with the ups and down of my emotional states and realities of the moment in my life.

This is also why I’ve described our lives as iterative.

I appreciate the notion that life is about constant reinvention, constantly utilizing the information and scenario of the moment to propel us to the next thing without a clear path.

Dickson suggests that although we can’t completely eradicate our prediction failures, there are ways to mitigate their impact: trust your inner voice (to a point); set personal guardrails; and take a breather. The article explains how each of these strategies can help.

Dickson ends with this.

None of which is to say that these rules and mental reminders will give you open access to your future self. The future has a knack for laughing at our plans and predictions. However, by simply accepting that your preferences and tastes will change, you can better prepare for the inevitable.

So, go ahead and make plans. Just be ready to alter them or abandon them entirely. Because that’s just how life works.

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