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Make Decisions Today That Will

Impress Your Friends In 20 Years
You won’t have the same friends 20 years from now.

Benjamin Hardy, PhD · Following

7 min read · Sep 10, 2020

2.5K 24
 https://unsplash.com/photos/p0ZvBVpW3KY

In 20 years from now, you won’t be the same person. You won’t care about
the same things. The question is: Who will you be in 20 years? And what will
you care about then?

According to research done by Dr. Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, it’s uncommon

for people to spend much time imagining their future selves. Instead, people
assume that who they are now is who they will always be. This is not only
faulty thinking. But it leads to bad decision making.

As Gilbert states:

“At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the
lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people,
we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made.

So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good
money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults
rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked
hard to gain. On and on and on.

The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions
that our future selves so often regret?”

Your Future Self Is A Different…

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