Good morning.

How is your weekend so far? Are you ready for the holidays?

OK, here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. What if the version of you making today’s decisions may not be the one living with them? Let’s compare current you and future you.

• You have to check this out. Sometimes a video works better. 📺

Let’s jump in! 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The end of history illusion.

It’s almost the new year—a perfect time to reflect and predict.

What if we make the process more interesting this year?

OK, think back ten years to 2015. Where were you? What were your values and priorities? What were you most interested in? What was your personality like? What was your favorite band?

On a scale from 1 to 10, to what degree have you changed since then (where 1 is zero change, other than age, and 10 is complete change)?

Do you have this number in your head?

Now, look ten years ahead to the year 2035.

What do you think you’ll be like in 2035? About the same as you are now, or totally different? Again, give this a number from 1-10.

Is your looking back “degree of change” number a little higher than your looking-forward-in-time number?

Consider for a moment how your brain completes this exercise.

When you look back, you use a reconstructive process that involves memory and aids like calendars and photos. You have concrete materials to work with (even if your memory of the past ten years is surely filtered through rose-colored glasses).

What about when you look forward? Here, you only have your imagination to work with. You must use a constructive process. This isn't easy to do.

Is it possible that your brain misinterprets something difficult to do (predict how much you will change in ten years) as something unlikely to happen?

That’s one theory behind the cognitive bias called:

The End of History Illusion.

A group of psychologists, including Daniel Gilbert, asked over 19,000 people to report how much they had changed in the past 10 years and to predict how much they would change in the next 10 years.

They asked questions about values and personality traits. They also asked people to name their best friends and their favorite type of vacation, hobby, and music. For each, they asked:

• Do you think that will change over the next 10 years?

• Did that change over the last 10 years?

Across all question types, people said they had changed far more in the past ten years than they believed they would in the next ten years.

This feels intuitive for the early stages of life, but aren’t your values and personality traits fairly settled by midlife?

It’s not. The research found that people of all ages consistently underestimate how much they will change in the future.

“Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute, but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be,” says Gilbert.

Said another way, people of all ages believe (incorrectly) that the current version of themselves is fully baked. After all, you’ve matured, you’ve learned, you’ve refined your tastes, you’ve been to therapy. Perhaps a few things will change, but nothing fundamental.

As the researchers conclude, everyone believes: “History, it seems, is always ending today.”

The research data shows a consistent pattern in terms of the delta between our predictions and our lived reality—whether the topic is values, personality traits, friendships, or vacation/musical preferences.

Yes, the pace of change slows as we age, but our predictive errors persist throughout life:

Gilbert and his colleagues have two related theories for why this cognitive bias persists:

1. As noted above, we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine how we will change over time, it's not likely to happen. “I can’t really picture it” quietly becomes “it probably won’t happen.”

2. There’s also a motivational layer. Most of us believe our current personalities are reasonably good, our values defensible, our preferences sensible. The idea that we might change substantially can feel destabilizing, threatening the sense that we understand ourselves and that our current choices make sense.

So, we do something very human. We treat the present as a kind of psychological resting place, even though nothing in our own history supports that conclusion.

When can this cognitive bias steer you astray?

You continually make consequential decisions about the future.

It is worth asking yourself:

Are you making these decisions to appeal to 2025 you, 2030 you, or 2035 you?

What if a decision made today relied too heavily on a specific value, preference, or priority that is merely top of mind right now?

Have you seen this happen to you or others?

You might see it when people overinvest in solutions designed to fix how they feel now—like leaving a demanding job to address exhaustion and turning a newly discovered passion into an entire life plan.

This dynamic can also contribute to decision paralysis. When decisions are imagined as permanent, the cost of being wrong feels high. People may wait for clarity, believing that once they fully understand who they are and what they want, movement will feel safe.

What ties these together is the same assumption: the present self is treated as a reliable stand-in for the future self.

Ideas to make better decisions.

Once you notice this illusion, you start seeing how quietly it shapes your decisions.

One way forward is to avoid treating decisions as all-or-nothing bets and begin treating them as portfolios. Instead of asking which single path to choose, ask what can stay steady, what can be tested, and what should remain possible. Instead of one perfect answer, perhaps you want to create space to learn and evolve.

Another idea is to consciously expand the time horizon of “current you.” For example, if you were deciding where to live, begin by plotting your home location priorities over your lifetime. What mattered to you most 20, 10, and 5 years ago? How does that relate to your current priorities? You may find that some factors are stable while others are shifting (perhaps in direction).

A final idea is to design for reversibility. Decision paralysis often comes from the felt cost of being wrong. Reduce that cost.

Time-box commitments. Invest in stages. Make reversible moves before irreversible ones.

Change the question you ask yourself.

Instead of: What do I want right now?

Try: What’s the next move that will teach me the most with the least downside?

The role of identity versus values in decisions.

Long-time readers may remember my May 2025 letter titled "The Beauty of Irreversible Decisions."

In that letter, I flagged the role of reversible decision in regret. I noted the research that found the key factor leading to regret is whether you still have the opportunity to change a prior choice or decision—creating an open loop, the fuel for regret.

Now I am suggesting irreversible decisions can be beneficial. What the heck? Is this a vivid example of me changing radically in seven months? 😅

In fact, the difference is whether your identity or your values drives decisions.

Many irreversible decisions that age poorly are anchored to identity. They assume that who you are now, what you enjoy now, and how you define yourself now will remain largely intact.

Identities drift. Preferences change. Interests fade and reappear. If you tie a permanent decision to who you believe you are right now, you’re betting on stability that doesn’t exist.

Irreversible decisions that age well are usually anchored to values. They don’t require predicting your future self as accurately. They only require that, even if you change, you’ll still respect the choice you made.

To be clear, the research on the end-of-history illusion documented that values do indeed change over our lifetimes. But a decision anchored to values rather than preferences has a better chance of aging well — even as you change.

A helpful test is: If I change more than I expect, will my future self still respect this choice?

The end-of-history illusion doesn’t mean you should stop committing. It just means you should stop assuming the present version of yourself is the final one.

Human beings are works in progress who keep forgetting that fact.

Visual summary of today’s letter:

Thanks for reading today, my friend.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Kevin

From the IYKYK files: