Change Is Unavoidable
There’s a psychological concept I keep coming back to lately called the End of History Illusion. The name sounds dramatic, but the idea is surprisingly simple — and kind of humbling.
It describes our tendency to overestimate how much we’ve changed in the past, while underestimating how much we’ll change in the future.
We can usually look back five or ten years and think, Wow, I was a different person then. Different priorities. Different values. Different nervous system, even. And yet, when we look forward, we tend to assume: This version of me? This one is basically finished.
We feel like we’ve arrived.
But we haven’t. None of us have.
Researchers found that people of all ages — from teenagers to retirees — believe their current preferences, personality, and worldview will remain relatively stable going forward. And they’re almost always wrong. Not because they’re foolish or avoidant, but because change is built into being human.
Morgan Housel talks about this in The Psychology of Money, but this illusion shows up everywhere: careers, relationships, beliefs, spiritual paths, parenting styles, even how we define happiness.
What’s important here is this: the End of History Illusion isn’t a flaw to fix. It’s not something to shame ourselves for. It’s just how our minds work. We crave coherence. We like feeling settled. Imagining future versions of ourselves can feel destabilizing, even threatening.
And this is where practices like acceptance and surrender quietly come in.
If we’re bad at predicting who we’ll become — and we are — then rigid control starts to look less wise and more exhausting. Acceptance doesn’t mean passivity. Surrender doesn’t mean giving up. They mean loosening our grip on the fantasy that we can lock life into a permanent shape.
They mean making room.
Room for future versions of you who may want different things.
Room for values that evolve.
Room for needs you can’t yet imagine.
When we accept that change is inevitable, we stop demanding certainty from ourselves. We stop asking, “Why can’t I just figure this out once and for all?” And instead we ask, “How can I stay responsive to who I’m becoming?”
The best we can do isn’t to predict the future self perfectly. It’s to stay aware, flexible, and compassionate as life keeps doing what it does best — unfolding.
That’s not a problem to solve. It’s just life.
Happy to be in your corner,
Tom Page, LCPC
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