I\u2019d like to introduce you to two people you know very well, although not by name: your experiencing self and your remembering self.<\/p>\n
Your experiencing self is the part of your conscious mind that experiences the present moment. In your case, it\u2019s reading these words right now. In a while it will experience you shutting the book, putting it down, maybe getting to your feet and brewing a cup of tea. Your experiencing self experiences not only what you\u2019re currently doing but also what you\u2019re thinking and feeling as you do it. It perceives physical conditions like tiredness, toothache or tension, mixing it all together into a single experienced moment.<\/p>\n
How long does a moment last? Psychologists estimate three seconds, give or take. That\u2019s the span of time we perceive as the present. Basically, it\u2019s all the experienced things we condense into \u201cnow.\u201d Longer periods are perceived as a series of individual moments. Discounting time spent asleep, this adds up to approximately twenty thousand moments per day\u2014about half a billion moments over an average lifespan.<\/p>\n
What happens to all the impressions hurtling through your brain every second? The vast majority are irretrievably lost. Test yourself: what exactly did you experience twenty-four hours, ten minutes and three seconds ago? Maybe you had to sneeze. Or you looked out of the window. Brushed a crumb off your trousers. Whatever it was, it\u2019s gone now. We retain less than a millionth of our experiences. We\u2019re gigantic experience-vanishing machines.<\/p>\n
That was your experiencing self. The second person I\u2019d like to introduce is your remembering self. This is the part of your conscious mind that gathers, evaluates and organizes the few things your experiencing self hasn\u2019t thrown away. If, twenty-four hours, ten minutes and three seconds ago, you were putting the best praline you\u2019ve ever tasted into your mouth, then perhaps your remembering self does in fact still know that.<\/p>\n
The difference between your two selves can be amply illustrated with a simple question. Are you happy? Take a little time to answer the question.<\/p>\n
Okay. How did you get on? If you consulted your experiencing self, it will have replied with your currently experienced condition, your mental state during that exact three-second interval. As the author of the words you\u2019re reading, I naturally hope the response was positive. If, however, you asked your remembering self, it will have given you a broad assessment of your overall mood\u2014roughly how you\u2019ve been feeling recently, and how generally satisfied you are with your life.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the two selves rarely give the same reply. Researchers studied happiness among students during the holidays. With some they randomly surveyed their momentary state, texting them questions several times a day. With others, they questioned the students at the end of the holiday. The result? The experiencing self was less happy than the remembering self. Not surprising, really. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard of rose-tinted glasses: lots of things seem better in retrospect. But this also means we shouldn\u2019t trust our powers of recall, because they\u2019re prone to systematic errors.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s going on here? Daniel Kahneman calls it the peak\u2013end rule, which we encountered in Chapter 1. He realized that we remember most clearly the peak of an episode, i.e., the moment of greatest intensity, and the end. Hardly anything else filters through into our memories.<\/p>\n
Not even duration matters. The students didn\u2019t factor in the length of the experiment at all, whether it lasted sixty or ninety seconds. This holds true more generally: whether you\u2019re on holiday for one week or three, your memory of it will be roughly the same. This cognitive bias is called duration neglect, and apart from the peak\u2013end rule it\u2019s the most serious error your remembering self can commit.<\/p>\n
While the experiencing self is profligate (it throws almost everything away), the remembering self is remarkably error-prone\u2014and it leads us to make the wrong decisions. Because of our remembering self\u2019s miscalculations, we tend to prize brief, intense pleasures too highly and quiet, lasting, tranquil joys too little: bungee jumping instead of long hikes, thrilling one-night-stands instead of regular sex with your partner, attention-grabbing YouTube videos instead of a good book.<\/p>\n
There is a whole genre of books on \u201cextreme living.\u201d Their authors are almost exclusively war reporters, extreme mountain climbers, start-up entrepreneurs or performance artists. They preach that life is too short for moderate pleasures. Only in extreme highs and lows can you really \u201cfeel\u201d anything. A calm, unspectacular life is a failed life. These authors\u2014and their readers\u2014have fallen into the trap of the remembering self. Running barefoot across the USA or conquering Everest in record time can only be considered wonderful experiences in retrospect. At the time, they\u2019re torture. Extreme sports feed memory at the cost of moment-by-moment happiness.<\/p>\n
So which one matters, your experiencing self or your remembering self? Both, of course. Nobody wants to miss out on great memories. Yet we tend to overvalue the remembering self, living with one eye on the aggregation of future memories, instead of focusing on the present.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
The Art of the Good Life<\/b><\/p>\n
Rolf Dobelli<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Image: https:\/\/gr.pinterest.com\/pin\/85005511696936760\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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