The majority of adults believe they become better people as they grow older. So said the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, in his excellent study The Seven Sins of Memory (2001).
But that process, he adds, requires us to mark down our younger selves. Or – worse – to rewrite who we were in order to fit with who we have become.
In one scientific study in 1960s America, teenagers were asked, ‘Is religion helpful to you?’ Some 70 per cent replied ‘yes’. Thirty years later, the same teenagers religion helpful to you at the age of 15? Only 25 per cent said ‘yes’. Those who had become atheists could not believe their youthful credulity.
