According to a front-page story in the Times earlier this week, your personality does change over the course of your lifetime. A study carried out by Edinburgh University found that the personalities of a group of people in their seventies had changed significantly since they were schoolchildren in the 1950s. Traits like perseverance, self-confidence and originality changed ‘beyond recognition’, according to the study’s leader Dr Mathew Harris. He was surprised, because the conventional wisdom among social psychologists is that these characteristics remain stable over a person’s lifetime.
At first glance, my own personality would appear to bear out these findings. Between the ages of 14 and 40 I was something of a hell–raiser. My main focus was getting into glamorous, star-studded parties, and I reached the summit of my ambitions when I landed a job in the mid-1990s as a caption writer for Vanity Fair’s monthly gallery of D-list celebs out and about in Manhattan. Not a particularly distinguished career for the son of a Labour party panjandrum and a BBC radio producer, but it suited me down to the ground.
I styled myself ‘Vanity Fair’s nightlife correspondent’ — a bit of a stretch, but close enough to guarantee admission to even the most swanky of soirées. I spent my evenings hopping between events in a Lincoln Town Car, usually sandwiched between two female companions.
Fast forward 20 years and I’m a respectable father of four and an education policy geek. The last time I went to New York was to visit a school in Queens. Where did it all go wrong?
But when I think about how I’ve changed, it feels less like I’ve had a personality transplant than the emergence into the foreground of characteristics that were latent for the first 40 years of my life.
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