4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2019
⏱️ 7 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hello everyone. It's Chris Anderson here with the special archive edition of TED Talks Daily. |
0:06.0 | This one is from psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the intriguing tension between our present and future |
0:11.8 | selves and how that impacts our happiness throughout our lives. If you enjoy the talk, |
0:18.0 | I'd urge you to check out my podcast, the TED interview, where I get to sit down with Dan for an updated conversation on the human quest to be happy. |
0:26.8 | It's hard to imagine a more important question. |
0:30.0 | So that's the TED interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. |
0:35.3 | You know, at every stage of our lives, we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become. |
0:43.4 | And then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. |
0:47.6 | So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed, that teenagers paid good money to get. |
0:54.1 | Middle-aged people rushed to divorce |
0:56.2 | people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose, what middle-aged adults |
1:02.9 | worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates |
1:07.9 | me, is why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret? |
1:14.0 | Now, I think one of the reasons I'll try to convince you today is that we have a fundamental |
1:18.4 | misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows |
1:25.5 | over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change |
1:29.2 | by the minute, but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical |
1:34.6 | point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it |
1:41.7 | middle age? Is it old age? The answer it turns out for most people is |
1:46.5 | now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around |
1:54.6 | with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become |
2:02.4 | the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. Let me give |
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