A twenty-years-old doesn’t value all the same things their fifty-years-old self will value
I have heard this often, but is it really so? When I think about my past self, it seems to me that I am actually more coherent than the society keeps telling me. But of course, maybe I am just lying to myself, rewriting my memory to believe that my past self shared my current values.
I am really curious whether my 20 or 30 years younger self would be okay with my current values and behavior, perhaps after hearing about experience they didn’t have yet.
How could we test this experimentally, without a time machine? By giving young people a values questionnaire, including a lot of hypotheticals, such as “if it turned out after repeated attempts that X does not work, would it be okay to give up on X?”, then calling them 10 years later and comparing the answers?
I have heard this often, but is it really so? When I think about my past self, it seems to me that I am actually more coherent than the society keeps telling me. But of course, maybe I am just lying to myself, rewriting my memory to believe that my past self shared my current values.
I am really curious whether my 20 or 30 years younger self would be okay with my current values and behavior, perhaps after hearing about experience they didn’t have yet.
How could we test this experimentally, without a time machine? By giving young people a values questionnaire, including a lot of hypotheticals, such as “if it turned out after repeated attempts that X does not work, would it be okay to give up on X?”, then calling them 10 years later and comparing the answers?