78 | We’re Going to Change and It's Hard to Know How

This post is Part 1 of 3 of the "Building Resilience Instead of Grasping for Certainty" series.

You take a break from work, which provides enough time to reflect on where you're headed, and the seeds of a career change are planted.

You have a child and how you allocate your time is refined in way that it has never been before.

You have a health scare and everything that seemed to matter a month-prior pales in comparison to what matters now for your well being and your outlook on life.

Your company gets acquired and the monthly expectations, income levels, and career trajectories of the former company are quickly at risk of becoming the “good old days”.

You meet a friend who leads a life that is very different from yours, but very much like one you desire to lead, and your curiosity is piqued in a way that spurs previously unimaginable action.

Some change is sudden, and some happens more organically over time.

Things that were once irrelevant become mission-critical, and things that were once mission-critical are now irrelevant.

But there is always change and it's always difficult to predict it when, where, and how it will happen.

Not only is it hard to predict, but it's hard to even acknowledge.

In describing the End-of-History illusion, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says, "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."

Implied in the illusion is that our preferences will remain the same indefinitely, which begins to make "more" an enticing way to solve for things.

“If my preferences are going to remain the same, then I need to have enough to support all of them forever and maybe some extra cushion to accommodate a couple of extra preferences - just in case.”

Then the case for ever-increasing income and assets is calcified.

But what if it could be different?

What if instead of being imprisoned to a past self and his or her flawed projection of the future we accepted that change was a feature of the experience?

What if we trusted that our spending ebbs and flows - both up and down - with each season of life and that we don’t need to accommodate every past and current self's preferences and versions of the future?

What if we trusted the fact that our level of income often naturally governs our level of spending and instead of fearing a reduction in income allowed it to lead us into the inevitable change?

It doesn't have to be a never-ending battle to acquire more and we don't need a money tree to experience the good life.

For as hard as it is to get a good grasp on our future self, our "remembering self" throws us a bone that makes the prospect of change a little less scary than it may seem…