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Life in the Right Direction

Self-Care - Spirituality - Wellness - Science

The Psychology of Your Future Self

August 15, 2014 by Peter Leave a Comment

The psychology of your future self“The Psychology of Your Future Self” is an interesting short talk about how we tend not to understand how our lives are full of change and how we only have meaning because of change. The talk is by Dan Gilbert, a psychologist. My notes from this talk are;

  • “at every stage of our lives, we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people that we will become”
  • “we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time”
  • we normally think that change will slow down later in life
  • the point where we think this will happen is “now” – whenever that is
  • change does slow down as we age, but nowhere near as quickly as we think
  • it’s called the “end of history illusion”
  • “it bedevils our decision making in important ways”
  • we overestimate the stability of our current preferences
  • related to “the ease of remembering compared to the difficulty of imagining”
  • we find it hard to imagine who we’re going to be [but this is key to building our future!!]
  • “time is a powerful force”
  • “we seem to appreciate this fact but only in retrospect”
  • “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished”
  • “the person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been”

Some very interesting phrases indeed and a very entertaining talk.

The Psychology of Your Future Self

Filed Under: Mind, Videos Tagged With: wellbeing

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Hi, I'm Peter Whiting. For my whole life I've been a scientist, but my life has taken a new track. Starting about 8 years ago, I began to realise that so much of our standard way of living just isn't right. We need to become more aware, press the reset button and try to live life in the right direction.

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