When Do We Become the Person We Ought to Be?

About a year ago, I got an email from an undergraduate at Notre Dame University. Anna Bohlen wanted to know if she could work with me on this newsletter. I am always trying to find ways to collaborate with some aspiring data analysts, so I was intrigued. After a couple of emails and a Zoom meeting, we developed a plan of action. Anna would apply for a few small grants at Notre Dame and, if she won one of them, we would field a survey together and write up some of the results. And you can probably guess what happened – Anna won one of those awards and now we have data.So, let me disclose this: This project was supported in part by a Sorin Fellows Program grant administered through the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.We fielded our survey through Qualtrics in August of 2025 and we managed to collect a total sample of 557 respondents. Not bad, right?One concept that kept bubbling up during our discussion was the idea of self-improvement. Young folks have a term for this: “maxxing.” For instance, some young men are devotees of “jaw-maxxing,” which is a series of facial exercises to make them have a more defined jawline. There is also a corner of the internet that is obsessed with sleep-maxxing. These folks track their sleep patterns obsessively, always looking for ways to catch a few more minutes of shut-eye.It’s pretty clear that the typical American is always on the lookout for ways to improve their lives on a whole bunch of different dimensions. We wanted to focus on that topic in a more philosophical way in our questionnaire. We asked them: How close do you feel you are to being the kind of person you ought to be, morally speaking?Our goal here was just to get a sense of the level of self-reflection going on in the average American.Because our sample size isn’t that big, we have to be careful about how we subdivide this data, so breaking it up into three age categories is about as good as we are going to do. But you can clearly see that there’s a distinct age effect on the question when it comes to people reflecting on their moral character.Among the youngest adults, a significant portion (38%) say that they are “very far” or “somewhat far” from being the person that they ought to be from a moral standpoint. In contrast, almost none of them feel like they are “already there.” But as you move down the graph, the bars begin to shift in the opposite direction. Among the middle age bracket, only 28% place themselves in the bottom two categories.But look at those who are 55 or older! Just 6% say that they are “very far” from the person that they want to be and 8% said “somewhat far.” In contrast, about half of them said that they were “pretty close” or “already there” when it came to the process of moral refinement. Older folks seem pretty content with the person that they’ve become.However, there were other questions in the survey that focused on this process of self-improvement.How often do you make a deliberate effort to improve your character?How often do you reflect on whether your actions were right or wrong?The graph on the left is the share of each age bracket who said that they made a deliberate effort to improve their character on a daily basis. Again, there’s a clear upward trend. Older folks are about 11 percentage points more likely than younger adults to say that they are trying every single day to improve their character. Think about that in conjunction with the prior graph where older folks were likely to say that they were closer to the person that they were supposed to be.Here’s a possible explanation: people who’ve spent decades consciously working on their character feel closer to the person they want to be.

Trying harder and feeling more arrived can genuinely go together.