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You would pay 129 dollars to see your current favourite band ten years from now. To see today the band that was your favourite ten years ago, you would pay 80. Those two numbers come from the same experiment and they measure something almost all of us get wrong: working out how much we are going to change.
This week I read a thread on a student forum. A girl in her last year of secondary school was torn between English Studies, Translation and Art History, and what was really eating her was something else: being shy and not making friends if she moved to another city. Below, somebody was telling her that plenty of people switch courses the following year and that the worst part is the embarrassment of admitting it.
I sat with that for a while, because I did Psychology convinced I would end up in HR, and here I am two years into a clinical master's and three lunchtimes a week as a dinner lady with six-year-olds. The seventeen-year-old who filled in that application form would never have signed up for this.
This has been measured. In 2013, Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson published six studies in Science with more than 19,000 people aged 18 to 68. Some were asked to remember how much they had changed in the past ten years. Others were asked to work out how much they were going to change in the next ten. Personality, values and tastes: the same story at every age. Everybody said they had changed a lot and everybody said that from here on, not much.
The concert study is the easiest one to see, because that is where the mistake costs money. That one, the fourth of the six, had 170 people aged 18 to 64. Some were asked how much they would pay today to see their current favourite band play ten years from now. Others, ten years older, how much they would pay today to see, this week, the band that had been their favourite a decade ago. The first lot said 129 dollars. The second lot, 80. That is 61 % more for a taste that, according to the people who have already been there, is going to fall away.
Two warnings so nobody pulls a fast one on you with this. They did not follow anyone for ten years: they compared the 24-year-olds with the 34-year-olds, and that is where the difference comes from. And the effect got smaller with age, though it did not disappear in any bracket. The 58-year-olds were also saying they were pretty much finished.
Now what I think, which is a different thing. Nobody is arguing that you know what you like today. What I do not believe is that you know what you will like in 2036. The girl on the forum is afraid of being shy, and at 17 shyness looks like your character; to me, at 22, it already looked like something else, a long phase that wore off while I served macaroni to thirty kids at once.
So I am not telling you to choose by thinking about who you are going to be, because you do not know and the study says you will get it wrong. Choose whatever boxes you in least. For each option look at one single thing: how much it costs to get out of there in two years' time.
And before you go to sleep, do the short test. Find the song you had on repeat in 2021 and play it all the way through. If it makes you cringe, you have your answer and it took you three minutes.