$129 vs $80: What a Concert Ticket Says About Who You'll Be

Two groups of people were asked to put a price on the same night out. One group was asked what they would pay to see their favorite band ten years from now. The other was asked what they would pay today to see the band they loved ten years ago. The first group said $129 on average. The second said $80. That gap, about 61 percent, is the cleanest number in a 2013 paper in Science by Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, and it carries the thesis of this post: when you judge how much you will change, you reliably guess low, so “this is just who I am” is a forecast rather than a measurement.

What did the 2013 study actually measure?

The paper, “The End of History Illusion” (Science, volume 339, pages 96 to 98), reports six studies with more than 19,000 participants aged 18 to 68. The researchers measured personality, values and preferences. They compared how much people said they had changed over the past decade with how much people predicted they would change over the next one. At every age in the sample, the past looked like a lot of change and the future looked like very little.

The concert prices are the part with money attached. Someone who expects their taste to freeze at its current setting will overpay for a ticket in 2036, because they are pricing a show for the person they are now. The authors named the pattern after Francis Fukuyama’s book: people treat the present as the point where history ended and they finally became themselves.

Is the effect settled?

It is contested at the edges. Harris and Busseri (2019) used three waves of the MIDUS survey to test the idea for life satisfaction and reported that most people were accurate or expected too much change, which cuts against a universal underestimate. Other researchers reading the same data disagreed, and the dispute turns on whether you look at averages for the whole sample or at change within individuals. Critics of the original design also point out that part of it leans on people’s memories of who they used to be.

What survives both sides is narrower than a slogan and still useful. People are bad at forecasting their own decade, the error runs toward “I’ll stay put” on the traits, values and tastes the 2013 paper measured, and certainty about your own future shape is not evidence of anything.

Why does this matter for a bad morning habit?

Take the sentences people use to close the case on themselves. “I’m not a morning person.” “I’m a night owl.” “I’ve always been bad at routines.” Each one contains a prediction: this will still be true in ten years, so do not bother. The end-of-history result says the prediction part is the weakest link, and you can check it against the one thing the verdict cannot argue with, which is your own record.

A related post covers the short-horizon version of this error, where the person at 10:45 p.m. misjudges the person at 5:30 a.m. The decade-scale version is the same mistake stretched out, and it is harder to catch because nobody can run the ten years to check. The chronotype research gives a reason for suspicion in at least one case. The 2019 genetics study by Jones and colleagues, which the night owl post walks through, found that the gene variants it identified account for only about 15 percent of the variation in wake time.

How much evidence is enough to overrule the verdict?

Less than most people assume, and the arithmetic shows why. A decade holds about 3,650 mornings. Three weeks of them, 21 mornings, is 0.6 percent of that. You are not trying to prove you will be a different person in 2036. You are trying to find out whether a claim you have held for years survives 21 attempts to disprove it.

Three outcomes are possible, and all of them beat the unexamined verdict:

• You wake at the target time on most of the 21 mornings. The claim “I can’t” is dead, and the open question becomes what it costs.
• You fail most of them, and the failures cluster (always after midnight, always on the nights you were scrolling in bed). That is a diagnosis, which a label never gave you.
• You land in the middle. That is also data, and a better forecast than the one you started with.

If you want to keep score properly, the Brier score log for personal goals shows how to write the forecast down before the week starts so hindsight cannot edit it. One caution on length: Lally and colleagues (UCL, 2010) found a median of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, so three weeks tells you whether the verdict holds up and does not tell you the habit is built.

What does this have to do with unfucking your life?

Most advice for turning a life around starts by asking for a big identity change, which is exactly the move the illusion makes feel impossible. The cheaper route is to skip the identity argument and generate a small, dated record. The person you will be in ten years is mostly the sum of mornings that have not happened yet, and the only ones you can touch are the next 21.

The weak point in a self-test is the self. People round up, remember the good days, and quietly reset the target. DontSnooze, an iOS app, is one way to remove that wiggle room: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll is posted to your friends in the app, where it stays for 48 hours and cannot be screenshotted. Watching friends is free; posting your own proof and streaks needs Pro. It will not tell you who you will be in a decade, and how it works is laid out in full for anyone who wants the details before deciding. What it does produce is a record of 21 mornings that you did not get to grade yourself.

Android is on the roadmap with no date, so if you are on Android, the paper log and the Brier score above do the same job slower.

Tolstoy made the case for early repair in fiction in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.