TED Talks Daily - (#2) Elise’s Top Ten: You don't actually know what your future self wants | Shankar Vedantam

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

"You are constantly becoming a new person," says journalist Shankar Vedantam. In a talk full of beautiful storytelling, he explains the profound impact of something he calls the "illusion of continuity" -- the belief that our future selves will share the same views, perspectives and hopes as our current selves -- and shows how we can more proactively craft the people we are to become.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. After all these years of hosting this show, one of the top questions I still get is, what are your favorite TED Talks? You may have just listened to the first talk on my list, Dan Gilbert's talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self. It pairs really well with this next talk from 2022 that I got to see live. I want to share it.

It's from journalist and podcast host, Sean Carr Vandantam. Sean Carr talks to us about what he calls a fallacy. the fallacy of thinking we can know who we're going to be and what we want in the future today. His talk offers a gorgeous perspective on the same questions Dan Gilbert explored in the first talk I shared, the notion that we think that we know what we want. But do we? When I was 12 years old, I fractured my foot playing soccer. I didn't tell my parents when I got home that night because the next day, my dad was

take me to see a movie, a soccer movie. I worry that if I told my parents about the foot, they would take me to see a doctor. I didn't want to see a doctor. I wanted to see the movie. The next morning, my dad goes, It's nice out. Why don't we walk to the theater?

It was a mile away. As we go, he says, why are you limping? I tell him I have something in my shoe. The movie was spectacular. It told the story of some of soccer's greatest stars, great Brazilian players. I was ecstatic.

At the end of the movie, I told my dad about the foot. He took me to see an orthopedic doctor, who put my foot in a cast for three weeks. I tell you the story today, because four decades later, I don't really consider myself a soccer fan anymore. Today, my sports fandom is tuned to another kind of football. Now, my 12-year-old self wouldn't be a soccer fan.

just find this incomprehensible. My 12-year-old self would see this as a betrayal. Now, you might say we all changed from the time we're 12, so let me fast forward a decade. When I was 22, I was a freshly minted electronics engineer in southern India. I had no idea that three decades later, I would be living in the United States, that I would be a journalist, and that I would be the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain. It's a show about human behavior, and how to apply psychological science to our lives. Now, we didn't have podcasts when I graduated from college. We didn't walk around with smartphones in our pockets.

So my future was not just unknown, it was unknowable. All of us have seen what this is like in the last three years, as we slowly try and emerge from the COVID pandemic. If we think about the people we used to be three years ago before the pandemic, we can see how we have changed. We can see how, anxiety and isolation and upheavals in our lives and livelihoods, how this has changed us, changed our outlook, changed our perspective.

But there is a paradox here, and the paradox is when we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become. But when we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we're going to be the same people in the future. Now, sure, we imagine the world is going to be different. We know that AI and climate change is going to mean for a very different world. but we don't imagine that we ourselves will have different perspectives, different views, different preferences in the future.

I call this the illusion of continuity. And I think one reason this happens is that when we look backwards, the contrast with our prior selves to who we are today is so clear. We can see it so clearly that we have become different people. When we look forward, we can imagine ourselves being a little older, a little grayer,

but we don't imagine fundamentally that we're going to have a different outlook or a different perspective, that we're going to be different people. And so those changes seem more amorphous. I want to make the case to you today that this illusion has profound consequences not just for whether we become soccer players or podcast hosts, but for matters involving life and death.

Let me introduce you to John and Stephanie Rinka. We did a story about them for Hidden Brain some years ago. John and Stephanie had just eloped, gotten married at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts. He was 22, she was 19. John told me that after they got married, they traveled to different parts of the country. They eventually settled in North Carolina.

John became a high school basketball coach. Stephanie became a nurse. And because they lived in a rural part of the state, she would often make house visits to patients. Many of the patients she saw were very sick. They had terminal illnesses, very low quality of life. And when Stephanie came home from these visits, which she was often shaken.

And she would tell John, John, if I ever get a terminal illness, please do nothing to prolong my suffering. I care more about quality of life than quantity of life. In her more dramatic moments, she would say, John, if I ever get that sick, just shoot me. Just shoot me. And John Rinka would look lovingly at his wife,

his healthy wife, and he would say, okay, Steph. Okay. Fast forward a couple of decades. In her late 50s, Stephanie begins to slur her words. She goes to see a doctor who runs some tests, and he diagnoses her with ALS,

Lou Gehrig's disease. He tells her it's fatal, it's incurable, and he tells her that a day is going to come when she is no longer able to breathe on her own. Stephanie being Stephanie decides to extract as much joy and pleasure from life as she can. She spends time with friends and family. As she gets sicker, she and John spend some time on a beautiful beach that they both love.

But there comes a day when Stephanie, in fact, is no longer able to breathe. She is gasping for air, and John takes her to the hospital. And a nurse at the hospital asked Stephanie, Mrs. Rinka, would you like us to put you on a ventilator? And Stephanie says yes. John is flabbergasted. They've been having this conversation for 30 years. Surely that's not what Stephanie wants.

He doesn't say anything. The next morning, he says, Steph, when the nurse asked you yesterday if you wanted to go on a ventilator and you said yes, is that really what you want? And Stephanie Rinka said yes. Now, you might argue that if Stephanie had written out an advance directive,

if Stephanie had come into the hospital unconscious. If the nurse had asked John, what is it your wife would want? John, without hesitation, would have said, of course she does not want to go on a ventilator. We should try and figure out a way to keep her as comfortable as possible so that she can die with dignity. But of course, this only solves the legal conundrum. It doesn't solve the ethical problem here,

and the ethical problem is that Stephanie at age 39, as she was healthy, had no real conception of what Stephanie had aged at age 30. with a terminal illness, gasping for air, would really want. For the older, Stephanie, her younger self might as well have been a stranger, a stranger who was trying to make life and death decisions for her. Philosophers have talked for many years about a thought experiment. It's sometimes called the ship of Theseus.

The great warrior Theseus returned from his exploits. His ship was stationed in the harbor as a memorial. And over the decades, parts of the ship began to rot and decay, and as this happened, planks were replaced by new planks, until eventually every part of the ship of Theseus was built from something new. And philosophers, starting with Plato, have asked the question, if every part of the ship of Theseus is new, is this still the ship of Theseus?

You and I are walking examples of the ship of Theseus. Our cells turn over all the time. The people you were 10 years ago are not the people you are today. Biologically, you have become a different person. But I believe something much more profound happens at a psychological level. Because you could argue, a ship is not just a collection of planks,

a body is not just a collection of cells. It's the organization of the planks that makes the ship. It's the organization of the cells that make the body. If you preserve the organization, even if you swap, planks in and out, or cells in and out, you still have the ship, you still have the same body. But at a psychological level, each new layer that's put down is not identical to the one that came before it. The famous plasticity of the brain that we've all heard so much about means that on an ongoing basis, you are constantly becoming a new person.

This has profound consequences for so many different aspects of our lives. You know, I have the illusion that 12-year-old Shankar who wanted to be a soccer star and 52-year-old Shankar who is the podcast host and 82-year-old Shankar who will hopefully be living one day on a beautiful beach, that these are all the same person. Is that really true? Let's set aside the philosophical questions for another day, And let me tell you about some of the practical challenges of this problem.

When we make promises to other people, when we promise to love someone till death do us part, we are making a promise that a stranger is going to have to keep. Our future selves might not share our views, our perspectives, our hopes. When we lock people up and throw away the key, it's not just that the people we imprison are going to be different in 30 years from now, we are going to be different 30 years from now.

Our need for retribution, for vengeance, might not be what it is today. When we pass laws, we often do so with an intent of making a better country, improving our country. But any country that's been around for a few decades has numerous laws in the books that made perfect sense when they were crafted. In fact, it was seen as enlightened when they were crafted,

And today they seem antiquated or absurd, or even unconscionable. And all of these examples stem from the same problem, which is that we imagine that we represent the end of history, that the future is only going to be more of the same. I have three pieces of advice on how to wrestle with this wicked problem. And it is a wicked problem, because all of us spend so much of our lives trying to make our future selves happy.

We don't stop to ask, is it possible that in 20 or 30 years, our future selves are going to look back at us with bewilderment, with resentment, that our future selves will ask us, what made you possibly think that that is what I would want? The first piece of advice I have is if you accept the idea that you're going to be a different person in 30 years' time, you should play an active role crafting the person you are going to become. You should be the curator of your future self.

You should be the architect of your future self. Well, what does that mean? Spend time with people who are not just your friends and family. Spend time on avocations and professional pursuits that are not just what you do regularly. Expand your horizons, because you're going to become someone different, you might as well be in charge of deciding who that person is going to be. So the first piece of advice is to stay curious.

Second, as we make pronouncements on social media or in political forums or at dinner parties, let's bear in mind that among the people who might disagree with us are our own future selves. So when we express views with great certitude and great confidence, let's remember to add a touch of humility. This is true, by the way, not just at an individual level, It's also true at an organizational level.

I was speaking some time ago with this young woman, wonderful woman. She had just reached a position of authority at her organization, and she had many idealistic ideas of how she wanted to change her organization. And she asked me, how do we make these changes so that in the future, no one's going to come along and undo the changes that I have made? And it's a very human impulse,

but it stems from the same belief that our perspective on history is the final word. And quite simply, this is wrong. Three, I've given you a number of ways in which our future cells are going to be weaker and frailer than we are today.

And that is true. That is part of the story. But it is only a part of the story. Our future cells are also going to have capacities and strengths and wisdom that we do not possess today. So when we confront opportunities and we hesitate, when I tell myself, I don't think I have it in me to quit my job and start my own company.

Or I tell myself, I don't have it in me to learn a musical instrument at the age of 52. Or I tell myself, I don't have it in me to look after a disabled child. What we really should be saying is, I don't have the capacity to do those things today. That doesn't mean I won't have the capacity

to do those things tomorrow. So lesson number three is to be brave. I believe that if you can do these three things, if you can stay curious, if you can practice humility, and you can be brave, then your future self will look back at you in 20 or 30 years, we'll look back not with resentment or bewilderment, but we'll look back at you

and say thank you. Thank you. That was Sean Carr Vendantam, speaking at TED 2020. This is the second of 10 talks from the TED Archives that were reposting as part of our first podcast playlist of my personal top 10 TED Talks.

And speaking of the future and how we live with it and envision it today. Next up is a talk that has had a profound impact on my life as a parent. It's from the poet Sarah Kay. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos,

Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazo. I'm Elise Hu. Thanks for listening. Time to check on the skies. It's another sunny day in Calgary. in a place ranked North America's most livable city. Tomorrow, blue sky thinking in the blue sky city should hold steady, and the outlook remains optimistic throughout the week.

So come grab your dreams and enjoy watching them take hold. It's possible in Calgary, the Blue Sky City. For the full economic forecast, visit calgary economic development.com.