TED | 为什么我们总作出让未来后悔的决定？

 

 

演讲简介

2014 | “人类还处在发展变化的过程中，却错误的以为他们不会发生任何改变了。”丹·吉伯特分享了他最近关于一种他称作“历史错觉的终止”现象的研究，描述的是我们会不自觉地认为若干年后的自己跟现在不会有什么不同。(小提示：事实并非如此。)

 

 

演讲精彩片段（节选）欣赏

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.

在我们生命的每个阶段，我们都会做出一些决定，这些决定会深刻影响未来我们己的生活，当我们成为未来的自己时，我们并不总是对过去做过的决定感到高兴。所以年轻人花很多钱，洗去当还是青少年时花了很多钱做上的纹身。

 

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?

中年人急着跟年轻时迫不及待想结婚的人离婚。老年人很努力的挥霍着作为中年人时不停工作所赚的钱。如此没完没了。作为一个心理学家，让我感兴趣的问题是， 为什么我们会做出让自己将来常常后悔的决定?

 

Now, I think one of the reasons - I'll try to convince you today - is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl?

我认为其中一个原因——而我今天想说服你们的，就是我们对时间的力量有个基本的错误概念。你们每个人都知道变化的速度，随着人的年龄增长不断放慢，孩子们好像每分钟都有变化，而父母们的变化则要慢得多。那么生命中这个让变化，突然间从飞速变得缓慢的神奇转折点应该叫什么呢?

 

Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.

是青少年时期吗?是中年时期吗? 是老年阶段吗? 其实对大多数人来说，答案是，现在，无论现在发生在什么。今天我想让大家明白的是，我们所有人都在围绕着一种错觉生活，这种错觉就是，我们每个人的过去，都已经结束了，我们已经成为了我们应该成为的那种人，在余下的生命中也都会如此。