A verdict you can only give from here
Most people can name something they have outgrown. A friendship that ran on a shared circumstance, a way of dressing, a job title that used to feel like a destination, an argument they used to have with everyone. The naming comes easily and it comes with a small warmth, because to say that you have outgrown something is to say that you grew.
That warmth is the reason to look at the sentence twice. Outgrown is a verdict, and a verdict is passed by someone, from somewhere, at a particular moment. The someone is you as you are now. The somewhere is the present, which is the one vantage point from which the old version of you has already been measured against the new one and found short. Nobody has ever asked the earlier version for a second opinion.
This article is built differently from the others on this site, and the difference is worth stating at the start. It does not stack a row of studies and move through them quickly. It takes one finding and goes through it a clause at a time, because most of what is surprising in it sits inside its individual clauses and gets lost when the finding is compressed into a headline. Three other sources come in afterward, only where the first one runs out. There is also no named object here for you to carry away. The idea does not want a name, and giving it one would turn something you did into something you own, which is the opposite of what the evidence suggests.
The cost of that choice is a plain one. Everything said about these studies below rests on what their published abstracts state, because those are the texts that anyone can read without a subscription. Where the abstract is silent, this article is silent too, and it will say so.
One finding, a clause at a time
Quoidbach et al. (2013) measured the personalities, values and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68. That is the first clause, and it matters for what it leaves out as much as what it includes. The study did not ask a few dozen students about their weekends. The range of ages is wide enough that the later results cannot be put down to the quirks of one stage of life.
The next clause is about what the participants were asked to do. They were asked to report how much they had changed in the past decade, to predict how much they would change in the next decade, or both (Quoidbach et al., 2013). Two directions of time, then, looked at by people of every age. The comparison is between the story people tell about the road behind them and the story they tell about the road ahead.
The result is that young people, middle-aged people and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future (Quoidbach et al., 2013). Read that slowly. It does not say that older people had stopped changing. It says that people at every age, including the youngest, expected the future to be quieter than the past had been. An eighteen year old and a sixty year old made the same kind of forecast about themselves, and they cannot both have been describing the end of their development.
The authors then give their reading of why. People, they say, seem to regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives (Quoidbach et al., 2013). The word to hold onto is finally. The present does not feel like one more point on a curve. It feels like the place where the curve was always headed, and from that place the earlier stretch looks like a climb and the later stretch looks like level ground.
The last clause is the one with consequences. The abstract reports that this belief led people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences (Quoidbach et al., 2013). A belief about yourself that sits in the head would be a curiosity. A belief that changes what a person is willing to pay is a belief that acts on the world.
Put the clauses together and the shape of the finding is this. Asked about the past, people feel the distance they have come. Asked about the future, they feel that they have arrived. The same person, holding both feelings at once, has no way of noticing that they cannot both be right.
What that design can and cannot show
It helps to be exact about what kind of evidence this is, because the finding is easy to misread in either direction.
The abstract describes people reporting on their own change and predicting their own change (Quoidbach et al., 2013). Those are beliefs and expectations. This article does not have the study's methods in front of it, so it will not describe how the comparison between ages was made or how change was scored. What can be said is limited to what the abstract says: people at every age described a past of large change and a future of small change.
That limitation matters for how far the finding can be pushed. It does not tell you how much you have changed. It tells you that your sense of how much you have changed, and of how much you will, comes with a tilt. A reader who takes the finding to mean that they must be about to change enormously has gone further than the abstract goes. A reader who takes it to mean that their present self is a temporary arrangement has gone further still.
What survives is smaller and more useful. Your own sense that you are finished is not good evidence that you are finished, because people who are demonstrably at every stage of adult life feel it equally. If the feeling is the same at eighteen and at sixty-eight, it is not telling you where you are.
The earlier you gets marked down
If the first finding says the future is underrated, a second says the past is.
Wilson and Ross (2001) present a theory of temporal self-appraisal. People, they propose, can maintain their typically favorable self-regard by disparaging their distant past selves and complimenting their recent ones. The reading of the abstract is worth taking one step at a time. The distant past self is the one who gets criticized. The recent past self is spared. The present self comes out well because it is compared with a rival who has been weakened in advance.
The theory comes with predictions, and the abstract reports what was found against them. In the first two studies, participants were more critical of their distant past selves than of their current selves (Wilson & Ross, 2001). In the third, this effect was obtained even when concurrent evaluations indicated no actual improvement (Wilson & Ross, 2001). That third result is the one to dwell on. It describes a case where, by a separate measure, nothing had improved, and the participants still judged their earlier selves more harshly.
Two further results concern the comparison with other people. Participants perceived greater improvement for themselves than for acquaintances and siblings over the same time period (Wilson & Ross, 2001). The sixth study supported the predicted effects of temporal distance and attribute importance on the evaluation of past selves (Wilson & Ross, 2001). Again the abstract says no more than that, and this article will add nothing to it.
Set this beside the first finding and the picture sharpens. Seen from the present, the future is short on change and the past is long on it. Part of the length of the past is real, and part of it, on this evidence, is the effect of marking the earlier version of you down so that the present version looks like it has come a long way. When you say you have outgrown something, you are partly reporting growth and partly reporting a judgment that suits you.
How a story of change gets built
A third source goes behind both. Ross (1989) hypothesizes that people hold implicit theories about how consistent their attributes are, together with a set of principles about the conditions likely to promote personal change or stability. He then suggests that people use those implicit theories to construct their personal histories, and he concludes that such theories can lead to biases in recall.
The word construct deserves attention. A history that is constructed is not a recording that was played back wrongly. It is a thing made from the present, using what you currently believe about how people change. If you believe that people mostly stay the same, your account of your past will tend to emphasize the sameness. If you believe that effort and a turning point produce change, your account will tend to find the turning point. In either case the account is built at the moment of asking, with the materials at hand.
This is a theoretical argument and a review of studies of memory for personal attributes, and the abstract is careful to say that the biases are ones that implicit theories can lead to. It is not a claim that your memory of yourself is wrong in a particular way. It is a claim about how the telling of a life is assembled, and about why the telling should be handled the way a good reader handles any account whose author has an interest in how it comes out.
What change looks like when it is measured
None of this makes change imaginary. The fourth source is the one that looks at change where it can be seen across time, in studies that followed the same people.
Roberts et al. (2006) used meta-analytic techniques on 92 samples to determine the patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Their results showed that people increase in measures of social dominance, conscientiousness and emotional stability, especially in young adulthood, at ages 20 to 40 (Roberts et al., 2006). People increase on measures of social vitality and openness in adolescence, but then decrease in both of these domains in old age, and agreeableness changed only in old age (Roberts et al., 2006). Four of the six trait categories showed significant change in middle and old age (Roberts et al., 2006).
Three things follow from that pattern, and each is narrower than the stories people tell.
The first is that change is real and it does not stop at any age the study covered. Four of six trait categories changing in middle and old age is not the picture of a self that finishes in its twenties.
The second is that the change is not a general feeling of becoming a different person. It is specific. Particular traits move, in particular directions, in particular decades. When someone says they have outgrown their old self, the measured record suggests that what moved may be something as particular as a degree of carefulness or steadiness, and not the wholesale replacement the sentence implies.
The third is easy to miss. The meta-analysis reports that longer studies and studies based on younger cohorts showed greater change (Roberts et al., 2006). The more time you give change, the more of it appears. A person who looks at the last month will find little, and a person who looks across a decade will find a good deal, and this is true even though no single day contained it.
The abstract reports average, mean-level change across samples. It does not say what happened to any one person, and a pattern that holds on average can fail to describe you. That is a reason to treat the figures as a map of tendencies and to rely on your own record for your own case.
Objections worth taking seriously
If the sense of having grown is partly flattery, then perhaps nothing has changed. That does not follow. The first and fourth sources point the same way on this. People of every age report change in the past (Quoidbach et al., 2013), and longitudinal studies find measurable change in several traits across the life course (Roberts et al., 2006). What the second source adds is that people judge their distant past selves more harshly than their current selves, even when concurrent evaluations indicate no actual improvement (Wilson & Ross, 2001). The honest reading is that something moved and that your account of how much is probably a little generous to the person telling it.
The end of the story has to come somewhere, and surely I am allowed to feel settled. You are. Feeling settled is a fine thing to feel, and nothing here suggests otherwise. The finding is about forecasts, and about people overpaying for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences (Quoidbach et al., 2013). The practical point is limited to the places where you are acting on a belief that your present preferences are permanent: a purchase that locks them in, a commitment that assumes them, an announcement that you will always want this. In those places the evidence is a reason to leave a little room.
Nobody remembers their earlier self neutrally, so the exercise is pointless. It is true that people use their implicit theories of self to construct their personal histories (Ross, 1989), and that is a reason to use something other than memory. The exercise below does not ask what you recall feeling. It asks you to look at what you did and wrote at the time, which is the one kind of evidence that was not assembled by the person you have become.
An hour with the record
You will need something that was written or recorded by you at least five years ago and not for an audience. An old message thread, a journal entry, a list, a file of notes, a draft of an application you never sent. The point of the dating is distance, and the point of the unaudienced document is that it was not written to impress.
Read it as you would read a stranger's, and write down three things on separate lines.
First, what the earlier you cared about, in the order it appears on the page. Do not correct it. If three of the five things concerned a person or a worry that has since left your life, that is a finding.
Second, what the earlier you took for granted that you would now question. The assumptions are usually the most telling part, because they were not written down as positions. They were in the grammar of the sentences.
Third, and the hardest, what the earlier you got right. This is where the second source applies. A reader who has been inclined to disparage a distant self will find this line difficult, and the difficulty is a measurement of the tilt.
Now compare the three lists with what you would have said, before reading, that you had outgrown. The overlap is the part of the verdict that was earned. What you said and the record does not support is the part that was a pleasant thing to say, and what the record shows that you did not mention is the change you could not feel, which is usually the larger of the two.
What nobody wrote down
The record has a gap, and it is the same gap that every account of growth has. It holds what you cared about and what you assumed, and it does not hold the day a particular care stopped. There is no entry for the morning you stopped needing an argument to be won, or the week a person you used to talk to every day became someone you thought of at the holidays. Those departures are not events. They are what the absence of an event looks like after enough time.
So if you want to know what you have outgrown, the first place to look is not the list of things you would proudly name. It is the part of the old page that you read as a stranger's, where the person is worried about something you cannot now make yourself worry about. That is what outgrowing sounds like from outside. From inside it sounds like nothing at all, which is why it so rarely makes the list.