The impossibility of predicting the future

While I was there in Levering Hall, going bonkers in the co-insanity of my fellow sisters, getting antsy with anticipation for new friends to love and pamper and frolicking around in my very unflattering (aka: borrowed from my male best friend) white jeans like a woodland creature, I suddenly thought, “Wait, what the heck am I doing here?

Am I... in a sorority?”

This seemingly unnecessary question is necessary because, well, a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. Young Lily would not have pictured Slightly Older Lily being in a sorority. Young Lily would not have even considered it.

And, though yes, that doesn’t matter — the past is the past and the present — it’s still something weird to think about. It’s weird to imagine myself a couple years ago and realize that the picture doesn’t match up with what I see in the mirror today. What I’m getting at, I guess, is change. It’s not something I think about often, my own growth, and when it hit me over the head during recruitment week, it really hit me. My gosh, I thought: How did that even happen?

About a month ago, I was watching a TED Talk about this same topic, the notion of self-reflection. It was called “The Psychology of Your Future Self.” In it, Dan Gilbert, an acclaimed social psychologist, discussed the ways in which human beings tend to underestimate the effects of time. The discussion centers around a research study that Gilbert and his team conducted on thousands of American participants.

Half of them were asked to predict how much their values (core aspects of their personality like honesty, humor, generosity, extroversion, etc.) would change in the next 10 years, and the other half were asked to report how much their values had changed in the last 10 years.

At every age, from 10 to 89, people vastly underscored the effects of the future. Although across the board people estimated their past change as fairly consequential (from 10 to 89, nearly everyone said their personality changed up to 30 percent in the past ten years), the predictions of change for the next 10 years were minimal. People seem to believe their present selves are their final, ultimate selves. Gilbert calls this the “end of history” illusion — the belief that “I can’t imagine changing my personality.” People might say, “My preferences now are my preferences forever. Heck, I can’t even fathom not liking the Jonas Brothers in the next 10 years. That would be absurd!”

But alas, of course, these people are proven wrong.

Despite the “end of history” illusion, you never really stop growing. This is something that I realized over the past couple of days, I suppose. Although I could always look back and clearly interpret my own self-development — I’ve gotten more confident, less concerned by what others think, more certain of my stance in the world, and alright, yes, I’ve become a sorority girl — I couldn’t have seen any of this self-development coming. When I was 13 and a drama geek and close-minded to the thought of sororities, I did not have the ability to know where I’d be in college. Dan Gilbert said it right: People don’t know how powerful time can be.

And even now, after all this deep talk and all this reflection, I’m still one of those people. Here I am in college, 19 years old, and I can’t picture where I’ll be at 22, or 40, or 65. I can muse about longer hair and world travel and fancy careers — that stuff is easy — but imagining real change is hard. If I couldn’t picture myself being in a sorority, a place that now feels like a core part of my identity, how can I picture all the changes that will shape me and recreate me so many years down the line?

Alas the disappointing answer I have to settle with is that I can’t. The future, and time, are unpredictable. Unknowable. Untraceable. Unforeseeable. And that’s scary, sure, but it’s also exciting. Because although Little Lily had no idea she’d end up at Hopkins and in Kappa and studying writing and film alongside some of the smartest people she’s ever met, Older Lily is so, so happy she’s here.

So in my experience, time is good. Change is good. And I can’t wait to see what unforeseeable things it has in store for me.