Your Personality Is Changing More Than You Think

Researchers call it the “end of history” illusion

Photo by Bankim Desai on Unsplash

A butterfly’s metamorphosis may be the yuckiest thing in nature.

A caterpillar starts by sprouting a crusty brown skin. It’s so tough that the poor thing gets frozen wherever it is, like if you were sitting in a chair one day and your skin turned into granite.

But that’s not the gross part. Because next, the caterpillar inside this crust just … liquifies. Literally. All of its muscles and innards disintegrate into a drippy cellular goo— keeping just enough plumbing in place to breathe. It’s basically a living soup inside a skin bag.

Of course, the caterpillar has no idea why it is melting down. It’s not thinking to itself, This is great, I’m almost a butterfly! It just knows that it is currently a helpless, useless sludge trapped inside a sack of old skin.

Do you ever feel like this?

I do.

It’s easy to look back at yourself ten years ago and think, what an idiot.