The Changes We Make

Earlier this month Donna Freedman published a winsomely rueful meditation on the way she’s changed over time. Case in point: in her reaction to small mistakes that cost her money.

That each of us is a different person at 40 from the one we were at 18 is a commonplace. It’s a given that we’re going to change. The question is, how much and in what direction?

Recently The New York Times published a report on a study showing that most of us are aware of how much we’ve changed from a “younger me,” but that we tend not to recognize that the “future me” will change just as  much or more from our present incarnation. Researchers dubbed this the “end of history illusion.”

It’s an  interesting idea — that we think the wonderfulness that is us right now represents the height of our personal evolution and so think we’re unlikely to change much more.

I wonder if that’s so. Or if it is true, by knowing this quirk exists, can we overcome it and anticipate or control the changes coming to us?

Recently I’ve become aware of a number of fairly abrupt changes in my own thinking and attitudes.

Number one change:

Yes, I’m afraid it’s true:
I’m no longer “funny” about money.

Not only have I lost the obsession about money, I hardly even give a damn.

Whence this bizarre new attitude? No idea.

It may have something to do with the decision to quit teaching and the realization that even if The Copyeditor’s Desk never earns another penny, there’s enough in savings to support me and pay my share of the Downtown House. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it wouldn’t do much harm, either.

Or it may reflect the fact that the business actually is meeting its revenue goal, at least for the moment: this month I billed twice the 2013 monthly goal.

The January AMEX billing cycle ended yesterday. Because I put all my discretionary spending on the card, that means the December/January discretionary budget cycle just closed, too. I figured I was going to have to borrow from savings to pay the bill, because I spent myself stupid this month: a pair of hiking boots, a new All-Clad stockpot, a couple hundred bucks on gardening supplies and plants, a dentist’s bill, three lunches out, even a dinner out (!), a new pair of Costco jeans, a prescription not covered by the Medicare Part D rip-off…holy mackerel! Expected to be about $300 to $400 in the hole.

But no! At the end of the day, I’d run the AMEX budget just $91 into the red. Because the checking account has $300 left over from last month, I won’t even have to take money out of Diddle-It-Away Savings to cover these indulgences.

That’s nice, but it doesn’t explain why I wasn’t worried. Other way around, actually: because I’ve quit worrying about money, I spent money on things that the Old Me probably wouldn’t have.

Another big change that’s occurred recently is that I am sick and tired of sitting in front of computers all day. Really. The realization that oiling the furniture and kitchen cabinets felt better than parking myself at a desk amounted to a revelation. I don’t wanna do this anymore! I want to go outside and play.

That’s not very practical, of course…I still do have to earn at least part of a living. However, the housekeeping task-a-day scheme represents a manifestation of that impulse. It gives me a reason to get off my duff and move around for an hour or so, even if it’s only around the house.

Not only does it provide an excuse to move about, it’s actually working to keep the house clean. With the house no longer looking like a dank cave (who knew light would come in windows if you clean them?), I find I want to be in other parts of the house. The bright, clean kitchen now invites me to cook better and more elaborate dishes, and to eat better. The uncluttered, undusty living and family rooms want me to sit out there and not hole up in the office.

Now that I’m not teaching and so not filling the hours with a stress-inducing activity, I’m sleeping better. Like amazingly better: seven or eight hours a night, without a little help from my friends! Maybe not coincidentally, I’m also drinking less.

The question is, can we anticipate or direct these changes in outlook or character?

To do so, we’ll have to shuck off the illusion that we’ve achieved the peak of our glory as of today. Dan P. McAdams, a Northwestern University psychologist, speculates that the end-of-history effect reflects “a failure in personal imagination.” To get past it, then, we would need to jump-start our imagination.

That would require first thinking about how personality traits shift with age. One thing is for sure: our quirks get more exaggerated as we grow older. A little stubborn at 20, were you? By 60 you may be downright pig-headed. Our opinions may become set in stone. Or they may flip completely — in my 20s I was a Goldwater Girl and so staunch an anti-Communist that I used to read John Birch Society publications. Today I vote for the likes of Barack Obama, regard my state’s right-wing legislature and its appointees as a kookocracy, and spend a fair amount of my time hanging out with homosexuals, lesbians, and people of color.

But that could also reflect a social change: in the Republican Party of 2012, Barry Goldwater would be a moderate. To consider how we might change in the future, we would need not only to imagine how our own personality traits might evolve, we also will need to consider how the culture around is is likely to change and how our personal circumstances will change.

To imagine how you might change over time, you’d almost have to imagine all of the future: what will the world be like in twenty years, and how will you adapt to it?

Do we know anything about the future? Well…

We can be pretty sure most Americans will have less as a very few continue to gather more. “Most Americans” applies to virtually all of us here at this blog.

Almost certainly our children will have fewer opportunities than those of us who are over about 40 had.

Education will continue to grow more costly, so that middle-class adults will be mired in debt most of their lives.

Medical care may (or may not) become more widely available but at the same time will become even less accessible than it is now, and quality for the average person on the street will continue to degrade.

Pay rates will continue to move toward Third-World levels as American companies continue to offshore work, including white-collar and “professional” jobs.

Laws governing our movement and behavior in public and in our private lives will become more restrictive.

Surveillance of our movements in public and in private will become more pervasive.

The impetus to get rid of “safety nets” and other forms of collective altruism will never go away and may in the end triumph.

Global warming will affect urbanized societies, pushing populations away from ocean shores but also stressing cities with drought and extreme weather events. Power grids may be affected for longer periods over wider areas.

If these things come to pass, the average American will have to continue learning to get by on less; attitudes toward frugality that have developed after the crash of the Bush economy will become more permanent.

Concepts of family and familial duty may change, as adult children will be expected to provide care for elderly parents who formerly were covered by government programs. More families may seek collective housing that will accommodate three or even four generations.

Ideas about personal health care and eating habits may change.

Just those few possibilities may cause individual personal shifts like these:

If you’re still in your working years, you may start to feel that caring for yourself and your family is far more important than career.

You might become more open to the idea of housing that would let your parents live under the same roof with you. Or you might conceive the idea of housing your family in a compound of small dwellings on the same lot, allowing several generations to live together not just now but far into the future.

You might lose interest in saving for the future, as it becomes increasingly difficult or even impossible to do so on a low salary under a heavy debt load.

Or you might become obsessive about saving for old age, to the point of becoming miserly in your present day-to-day life, knowing that any old-age support system that survives will do nothing to keep you out of poverty.

You might change your attitude about living with your kids, and you might start priming them to expect that they will have to care for you to some extent when you reach advanced old age. You or your spouse may decide to be a stay-at-home parent.

You could become more open to “alternative” healthcare strategies that are not science-based, as it becomes more difficult to get in to see medical doctors and as doctors have less and less time to listen to you.

Your political thinking could change as changes in the way government functions affect you positively or negatively.

Your thinking about the distribution of work within a family might change, as changes in education, pay, and access to medical care continue.

Seeing that the trend to convert higher education into voc-ed produces a nation of ignoramuses led by a small elite with more sophisticated intellectual training, you might change your thinking about the purposes of higher education.

Pretty complex, isn’t it? I think it’s not so simple as a “failure of imagination.” Change happens slowly, not only within us but all around us, so that often we’re not even aware of the change happening. To envision yourself ten or twenty years on down the line, you have to envision not just yourself but a lot of things and a lot of people as they may be in the future.

How do you imagine the Future You?