TED演讲中英对照1.

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?

在我们生命的每个阶段, 我们都会做出一些决定, 这些决定会深刻影响未来我们自己的生活, 当我们成为未来的自己时, 我们并不总是对过去做过的决定感到高兴。所以年轻人花很多钱洗去当还是青少年时花了很多钱做上的纹身。中年人急着跟年轻时迫不及待想结婚的人离婚。老年人很努力的挥霍着作为中年人时不停工作所赚的钱。如此没完没了。作为一个心理学家,让我感兴趣的问题是,为什么我们会做出让自己将来常常后悔的决定?

Now, I think one of the reasons -- I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history,

our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. 我认为其中一个原因——而我今天想说服你们的——就是我们对时间的力量有个基本的错误概念。你们每个人都知道变化的速度随着人的年龄增长不断放慢, 孩子们好像每分钟都有变化, 而父母们的变化则要慢得多。那么生命中这个让变化突然间从飞速变

得缓慢的神奇转折点应该叫什么呢?是青少年时期吗?是中年时期吗?是老年阶段吗?其实对大多数人来说,答案是,现在,无论现在发生在什么。今天我想让大家明白的是,我们所有人都在围绕着一种错觉生活,这种错觉就是,我们每个人的过去,都已经结束了, 我们已经成为了我们应该成为的那种人,在余下的生命中也都会如此。

Let me give you some data to back up that claim. So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. Here's three values. Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, as you age, the balance of these values shifts. So how does it do so? Well, we asked thousands of people. We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years. And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan. 我想给你们展示一些数据来支持这个观点。这是一项关于人们的个人价值观随时间变化的研究。这里有 3种价值观。每个人的生活

都与这三个价值观相关,但是你们可能知道,随着你们慢慢长大, 变老, 这三个价值观的平衡点会不断变化。到底是怎么回事呢?我们询问了

数千人。我们让他们当中一半的人预测了一下在未来 10年中,他们的价值观会发生多大的改变,让另一半人告诉我们在过去的 10年中,他们的价值观发生了多大

的变化。这项调查可以让我们做一个很有趣的分析, 因为它可以让我们将大约 18

岁左右的人的预测同大约 28岁左右的人的答案相比较,这项分析可以贯穿人的一生。

Here's what we found. First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you're wrong, because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think. At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the "end of history" illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and