When I was seven, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I collected rocks and fossils, memorized dinosaur names, and could tell you exactly which period the Stegosaurus lived in (it’s the Late Jurassic, in case you’re wondering). Then it was veterinarian, astronaut, fashion designer – each passion consuming me completely until the next one came along.
I ended up working at Google, and now I’m a neuroscientist and author. And I still don’t really know what I want. I get hypercurious about something until something else grabs my curiosity. For years I thought this was a personal failing, and I was desperately trying to figure out my One True Passion.
Until I realized… None of us really knows what we want, at least not with the certainty we pretend to have. We think we do. We make plans as if we do. But research consistently shows that humans are surprisingly poor predictors of their future desires and happiness.
And, as we’ll see, this might seem bad but it’s actually good.
The Forecasting Fallacy
Psychologists call our ability to predict our future emotional states “affective forecasting” – and we’re surprisingly bad at it. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that we routinely overestimate how happy or unhappy future events will make us feel, and for how long.
We think getting that promotion will bring lasting joy, or that a breakup will devastate us forever. Neither turns out to be true.
We’re also terrible at predicting the things we’ll enjoy in the future. In the Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers also write that “people exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”
What’s fascinating is our ability to acknowledge that our preferences have changed significantly in the past, while simultaneously believing they won’t change much in the future. Researchers call this the end of history illusion.
In reality, the data shows that the 40-year-old you will likely be as different from your current self as you are from your 20-year-old self. Your favorite music, your political views, your career aspirations – all are likely to shift in ways your current self cannot fully imagine.
I know this all sounds pretty negative, but this unpredictability isn’t a bug in our system – it’s the very feature that allows us to grow.
Finding Freedom in Uncertainty
My life changed when I stopped trying to plan my perfect future and started treating every day as an experiment instead. Rather than setting fixed outcomes (“I will become a successful author”), I began forming hypotheses (“I might enjoy writing a newsletter”).
An experimental mindset does something wonderful: it turns failure from something to be feared into valuable data.
When I decided to go back to university to learn more about the brain, I didn’t know if I would thrive in neuroscience research. I simply had a hypothesis that the work would align better with my curiosity. Some aspects of that hypothesis proved correct; others didn’t.
Rather than seeing this as definite proof I had taken a wrong turn, I treated these discoveries as useful information that helped me refine my next steps.
There’s something liberating about acknowledging that you don’t know what you’ll want in the future. It opens you up to possibilities you might otherwise dismiss. It makes you more attentive to the present moment, where your actual preferences (not your predicted ones) reveal themselves.
The beautiful uncertainty of not knowing what we want isn’t something to overcome – it’s something to embrace. It’s the liminal space where curiosity lives. It’s what keeps us learning and evolving throughout our lives.
So the next time someone asks you where you see yourself in five years, the most honest answer might be: “I don’t know yet – and that’s exactly as it should be.”