"Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll change much less, if at all, as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.
"The illusion protects us…from realizing how transient our preferences and values are which might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.
"Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Okay, that’s kind of a mouthful. I’m not good at pithy marketing slogans. Knowledge of Jake’s impending death brings with it the certainty that my life is about to undergo tremendous, nonconsensual upheaval, inevitably changing my preferences and values, though I don’t know any details except that I’ll change in likely vast and unexpected ways. Without the comforting illusion of stasis, what can I do to assuage the anxiety caused by reality? That’s what the videos are for."