As we age and reflect on our younger selves, the amount we change is difficult to ignore. Think back to what you were absolutely sure of when you were 10 years old, and compare it to what you’re certain of now. Depending on your current age, we can repeat a similar exercise for different points in our lives—our 20s, 30s, 50s, or perhaps before and after kids, before and after marriage, or after illness, divorce, death, or career upheaval. When we look back, we hopefully see change, growth, and evolution.
There’s an interesting quirk to this though: we tend to think that from this moment forward, our beliefs won’t change much. We see change clearly in the rearview mirror, but we expect our current selves to be pretty much fully formed. Psychologists call this the “end of history illusion”—the tendency to believe that the person we are now is the finished product, even though we’ve outgrown countless versions of ourselves before. In other words, we recognize change in hindsight, but we’re less open to it in the future.
Why do we accept that we’ve changed up until the present moment, yet doubt the likelihood of future change? Partly, this is emotional– present-day change feels uncertain, unstable, even like failure. But once change is behind us, we reframe it as growth and learning—something natural, even necessary. Hindsight lets us craft a coherent story about who we were and who we’ve become. Shifting our views on a job, a relationship, or a core belief in the present can feel like betraying some essential part of ourselves—especially when we don’t yet know how it all turns out. Viewing that same shift with the benefit of hindsight is more comfortable, as we’ve been able to craft change into a larger story.
Change becomes especially uncomfortable when our beliefs are tightly woven into our identity. If we’ve always seen ourselves as the strong one, the skeptic, or the committed one, even a small shift can feel like a threat to who we are. Major life events—getting sober, having a child, losing someone, changing careers—often force us to reexamine those core beliefs. But even after such transformations, we tend to settle quickly into a new self-image and assume it will remain fixed. We tell ourselves, “I’ve figured it out now,” as if the painful part—the learning—is behind us. It’s a comforting thought, but it isn’t true. The reality is that more change, more uncertainty, and more difficult lessons still lie ahead. And while that truth can be unsettling, it’s also honest. We cling to certainty because it feels safe, but in doing so, we often resist the very process that allows us to grow.
We often imagine fear of the unknown as something external—new environments, unexpected events, unfamiliar people. But in this context, the unknown is internal. The most unpredictable part of the future may be who we ourselves become. Our future beliefs, values, and perspectives are not yet formed, and that uncertainty can feel unsettling. Yet there's also potential in that unknown. If we allow space for it, our future selves may hold insights, strengths, and qualities we can’t yet imagine. Instead of clinging tightly to our current beliefs as if they were permanent fixtures, we can treat them as living things—capable of growing, adapting, and even outgrowing their original form.
The reality is that we are all doing the best we can in the present with what we have—just as our past selves did the best they could with what was available at the time. When we look back, we may see how limited our understanding was, how much we still had to learn. But that doesn’t mean our past selves were failures; it means they had the capacity for growth. When we offer them grace instead of judgment, we acknowledge that growth is part of being human. That same compassion can extend forward: if we believe our future selves will look back on us with empathy and understanding, we become freer to embrace change now. We no longer need to fear getting it wrong—we simply need to keep showing up, learning, and allowing ourselves to evolve.
If we’ve already lived through radical change and come out more honest, more grounded, and more human, we have every reason to believe we’ll do it again. Let’s make room for that next version of ourselves.
Cheers,
Doc
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