You are not you, you are your memories.
Consider the following question:
You have the option to go on a trip that is guaranteed to be the most exciting and memorable vacation you’ll ever have. The caveat is that you’re not allowed to take any pictures or videos and you’ll have to drink a potion that will erase all memories of the vacation after it ends.
What would you be willing to pay for a trip like that relative to a regular vacation? Would you want to go on a vacation like it at all?
The experiencing self vs. the remembering self
The question of how to improve our happiness is complicated by the fact that there’s not just 1 self to satisfy. There are really 2 selves that create 2 different conceptions of happiness. And these two selves aren’t always reconcilable.
As popularized by Daniel Kahneman in “ Thinking, Fast and Slow”, they’re referred to as the experiencing self and the remembering self.
The experiencing self: How happy am I moment to moment?
This is the person experiencing your life in the present moment and in all the prior moments. Each lived moment adds up to the experiencing self’s total level of happiness. But most of our lived moments are lost to us, never to be remembered. This leads us to judge our lives largely by what we remember from it, rather than by what we actually experienced. The sum of our lived experiences doesn’t equate to the amount of happiness we feel about them. This calculus is only accessible to us through the lens of our remembering self.
The remembering self: How happy am I with my life when I think about it in retrospect?
As we have now learned through various studies in Psychology and Behavioral Economics, what accounts for our satisfaction of past experiences is largely determined by two concepts:
Our recollection of an episode or experience is overshadowed by the peak experience (good or bad) and the end of the episode. As a result, time (the duration) matters very little to our remembering self because we largely judge the episode by the peak experience and its ending.
How you think about the last vacation you went on is mostly a result of the best or worst part of it, and how it ended. You might have spent the majority of your time in a state of pure enjoyment and relaxation. But if the most salient experience was the big fight you had with your spouse or when you lost your passport, that will “sour” everything else as far as your remembering self is concerned. And if your flight back home got canceled and you had to wait at the airport with screaming children and angry passengers for another 24 hours, this last experience will put a black stain on your overall recollection of the vacation.
As a result of duration neglect, you’ll also discount the length of an experience; a one-week vacation is pretty much indistinguishable from a two-week vacation. Even though the experiencing self will have had twice as many good experiences, the remembering self will generally only account for the best or worst experiences (peak-end rule). So the length will feel largely unimportant when you recall it.
An example: Consider the dilemma faced by doctors that need to administer a painful treatment to their patients. There are two ways to do it:
- One way is quicker but the intensity of the pain is very intense, leaving the patient with a bad memory of the whole ordeal.
- The second way takes twice as long but the pain tapers off gradually and is not as bad towards the end, resulting in a more pleasant memory for the patient about the whole experience.
Which procedure should the doctor choose? Which would you choose for yourself?
If you were to measure the experience objectively, the second way produces more overall pain, yet most of us would prefer it simply because we’d have a more pleasant memory of the procedure.
You are not you, you are your memories.
We are, in a sense, under the Tyranny of the remembering self because the remembering self is the one that makes the decisions. The experiencing self never gets a say.
The experiencing self if like a stranger to us, but it is that person, after all, that’s living our lives. Yet the remembering self gets to call the shots. We judge the value of future experiences, like a vacation, based on the story we will be able to tell about it (the memories we expect to get).
What makes you happy in your life and what makes you satisfied with your life are different things.
The former emphasizes the value of social experiences and moments with friends in particular. In this way of looking at the world, it is true to say that money doesn’t buy happiness.
The latter makes you value material accomplishments and conventional career success more. It’s related to taking account of your life by looking back, considering your most successful moments and everything you have accomplished.
Why do we put so much stock in our memories over our experiences? I think there are two reasons for this:
- Because we forget most of our experiences, memories are all we have left. It seems irrational to discount our experiences like that, but in another sense, it’s perfectly rational to do so. If you know that you’ll likely recount your satisfaction with a vacation based on your memories, then it becomes rational to optimize for good memories rather than just good experiences. This is why we obsess over taking selfies during the sunset instead of cherishing the moment.
- Our memories are what we use to construct a narrative of our lives as happy or unhappy. At the end of the day (or life, as it were) when you look back at your life most of your experiences are no longer accessible, so you have to construct a narrative based on what you can recall. I think we know this even unconsciously, so we optimize for good memories rather than good experiences — often to the detriment of the experiencing self.
So what gives? It’s unclear how we can reconcile these two different modes of judging wellbeing. In one sense, the experiences are the true measures of happiness. Yet if all we really care about in the end are our memories, perhaps it’s not so foolish to take all those selfies?
Originally published at https://philipskogsberg.substack.com.
