Shedding
I’ve noticed a Thing about myself, that’s probably a Thing about everyone’s self (because I ain’t special) – it’s that I shed my previous selves rather thoroughly and as it were callously, while thinking of my current self as the real self. I sometimes notice myself doing this and realize that my current self will be shed just as ruthlessly in the future, and I laugh a little.
NPR confirms that it is indeed a Thing about everyone’s self.
No matter how old people are, they seem to believe that who they are today is essentially who they’ll be tomorrow.
That’s according to fresh research that suggests that people generally fail to appreciate how much their personality and values will change in the years ahead — even though they recognize that they have changed in the past.
That is how it works. Looking back you know that it’s past, it’s stale, it’s been replaced. Looking forward you see nothing, because it’s not there yet. You’re perched on the front edge of the locomotive; everything behind you is the known behind-you, while what’s up ahead is…up ahead. The correct self is always the current self.
Daniel Gilbert, a psychology researcher at Harvard University who did this study with two colleagues, says that he’s no exception to this rule.
“I have this deep sense that although I will physically age — I’ll have even less hair than I do and probably a few more pounds — that by and large the core of me, my identity, my values, my personality, my deepest preferences, are not going to change from here on out,” says Gilbert, who is 55.
He realized that this feeling was kind of odd, given that he knows he’s changed in the past. He wondered if this feeling was an illusion, and if it was one that other people shared: “Is it really the case that we all think that development is a process that’s brought us to this particular moment in time, but now we’re pretty much done?”
It is an illusion, like an optical illusion. (That is, that’s what it feels like to me. Gilbert is the one who did the research, not me.) It’s an illusion born of the fact that the past is behind and known while the future is ahead and unknown.
Gilbert says he doesn’t yet know why people have what he and his colleagues call the “end of history illusion.”
One possibility is that it’s just really, really hard to imagine a different, future version of yourself. Or maybe people just like themselves the way they are now, and don’t like the idea of some unknown change to come.
That fits too. It’s odd…when I said I shed my previous selves as it were callously, I had in mind a kind of contempt I have for my previous selves – for being so clueless compared to my new and improved self now. It’s hilarious, really…we must all be Dale Carnegies, assuming every day in every way we get better and better.
Just think how marvelous I will be tomorrow!
I’m not sure it’s the same for everybody, though. As I look back on my life (I’m 60) it looks to me like I have always been pretty much the same person, although of course I have grown in a lot of areas (discovering and embracing feminism, for example).
But this same kind of thinking can productively be applied to the study of history. We tend to think that what we know and how we think today is the Pinnacle of Human Achievement, without realizing that people have always thought that. Like in my own field of classical music, today we look back on, say, Mozart, or the 4-keyed oboe, or Edison’s wax recording cylinder, as merely necessary stepping stones to the perfection we enjoy today — but at the time many people must have thought that those things represented “perfection” and couldn’t be improved on. So to understand the past we should put ourselves in the mindset of earlier people, seeing their accomplishments as significant as they did themselves, and we should also have some humility about our own place in history. There’s no such thing as an “age of innocence”, unless you’re willing to think of today as an age of innocence, too.
We can also apply it to moral progress. There was a point in U.S. history when we abolished the importation of slaves (continuing to permit the ownership and breeding of the ones that were already here, of course), and many must have thought of that as the summit of moral progress in that area. I often wonder, when people look back on the early 21st century 200 years from now, what will they see as obvious moral wrongs, that seem perfectly normal to us today? Some things might be fairly obvious, like racism and mass incarceration, but I’ll bet some would surprise us.
Interesting topic.
I am extremely aware of being a different person now than I was at various other parts of my life. I am glad for some changes, bothered by some others. I don’t consider my path to be inexorable progress in any way.
In that vein, I feel obliged to respond to this comment:
*waves at fellow classical musician* Not all of us think these changes to instruments represent “improvements”. Not all of us think more recent music, or even music from 200 years ago, is “better” than what came before it. (As you can possibly guess from my nym and my avatar.)
I think it would help tremendously if we could view our former selves, as well as other people’s current and former selves, with compassion and as works in progress instead of fixed, enduring entities. Doing anything else leads to the abandon-our-intellectual-history culture that we’re experiencing in contemporary feminism, and perhaps in the progressive left generally.
Interesting, Ophelia. I was pondering this very notion last night on facebook. Several friends that I’ve known and worked with from nearly 30 years ago chimed in and we all remarked on how the people that we were then, while still part of us in some way, were definitely very different selves. I’m not certain that I would enjoy the company of my 25-year-old self; in fact, I might mutter “asshole” under my breath at him and part company right away.
That’s not a fact, but a cognitive metaphor, and some people think of the past as ahead and the future as behind.
I don’t know, I’m kind of loving the idea that 60 year old me will be as different as I am from 30 year old me. Because I grew in pretty wonderful ways. I never dreamed I’d get a degree in mathematics. And I’m not sure where it is going to lead.
This speculation is pretty timely for me, as I’m starting to prepare for a major move after living a quarter of my life in one place. I know when I first moved here there were upsides and downsides, but after all this time all I can see are the upsides and I dread that any change will be for the worse. And yet it’s pretty much always been true that every move I’ve made has been to a better place than the one before…but from where I am now I just can’t see it happening this time.
BUT, our ‘new improved’ pinnacle selves are still dragging wagon-loads of pre-established notions and prejudices.A friend brought this up at a discussion a few days ago: how often people liberated from religion will demonstrate attitudes and outlooks molded by that very religion.
I’m torn between noticing positive (and negative) changes in myself over the last decade or so, AND the extent to which my reactions and feelings are dominated by experiences from 40 years back. I’m on the locomotive, but I seem to hear the caboose rattling along all the time
Shedding can be a means of running away, but it can also be an opportunity for growth. I’m all in favour of it. I’ve practised the tiny day to day skin flake style of shedding and the wholesale strip off your skin and walk away style.
Sometimes life just becomes so fucked up you have to decide what you can carry forward and abandon the rest. Other times you just throw away the trinkets you’ve outgrown.
I’m not sure I have that feeling, or at least not very strongly. I think of myself as being the same person all these years, although I’ve certainly changed. I can’t identify different past versions of myself and while I cringe at things I’ve done in the past, I can’t isolate the bits of me I might associate with those actions as “that person”. I expect myself to do similarly cringeworthy things at any moment.
But perhaps I’m taking things too literally.
“I’ve had the same ax for 20 years. 10 years ago I replaced the handle. Five years ago I replaced the head.”
@Sackbut:
Sure, and my cells are replaced all the time. I still call them my cells, though.
I was talking about how I feel about what I did and thought in the past. It doesn’t seem (to me) as though it was a different me or even a different version of me who did those things. It seems to me like me, even though I wouldn’t necessarily think or do those things now and might think or do still different things in the future.
The same joke in the UK is generally about a spade, rather than an ax and goes like this:
The joke is that there is a sense in which it’s still the same spade. There’s a continuity in my mind despite the fact that everything about the spade is different.
I can pick out things that have changed about the spade, but I didn’t have the same feelings about the changed heads and handles as I do about what’s to everyone else a brand new spade but to me the same one. I don’t think about the spade as getting better or going through different versions because of that continuity.
I don’t feel like a different person despite having changed. I can’t think of the me who did that one thing as a different me from, well, me.
Again, I suspect I’m taking all this too literally.
I keep my younger selves in a bucket. I occasionally read some of the things they wrote, and I’m condescendingly proud of how naively thoughtful and articulate they were… well, most of the time anyway. Sometimes I cringe so hard that I fall out of my skin – I guess this is how we become our older selves? – but that’s thankfully rare, and thankfully more so as the previous selves get older. My plan is to reach the point where I’ve fully dealt with the earlier sources of cringing, and stop generating new ones. I think that might be the path to immortality, possibly even to eternal youth if I get around to it soon enough!
Of course, the next realization is the painful bit, for progressives of all stripes.
By definition, we’re advocates of change for the better. We may disagree about what that ‘better’ is, of course, but we want it, and in our best moments, work for it.
And yet, after we are dust and ash, it is an almost certain truth (particularly if we have won many of the battles we now fight) that our successors will look at us and say, “What horrible people they could be! How backwards, how barbaric!” Things we don’t even notice today as being as awful in our context as slavery was in pre-Civil War America will be recognized and denounced, and we will be as condemned for it by future leftists as Jefferson is for owning slaves. And failing to recognize this, and to realize that it’s a good thing, is what leads to the stereotypical transformation from young progressive to elder conservative.
The only antidote that I can see is to repeat the mantra, “Someday, the ‘me’ I am now will have been a horrible person.”