Memorable
Lesson from this week's funeral
(4 min read)
I attended a funeral this week.
One of the speakers read a quote:
You haven’t lived in a given day unless during that day you laughed, thought really deeply about something, and cried.
Wham.
My interpretation?
Life is not about getting stuck in routines and going through the motions.
You want unique experiences.
In particular, you want a variety of interesting, memorable experiences.
Even a life sprinkled with both pleasure and pain would likely be one I’d choose over a life lacking meaning.
A life of monotony and indifference.
When you’re not experiencing something, what’s the point?
Mull over the Rocking Chair test.
You’re older than you ever expected to be.
You’re sitting on a rocking chair and reflecting on your life.
How did it go?
Are you pleased with your path?
And the decisions you made at each fork in the road?
Does a lot of your life blur together?
Were there stretches where nothing significant happened?
Or did you live your life with intention?
(Funerals force us to consider the Rocking Chair test, by the way.)
Okay, now let’s get meta.
Imagine you are planning a perfect vacation.
Where would you go?
What outfits would you bring?
What type of camera would you use?
Which accommodations and restaurants would you choose?
Now, what if at the end of your glorious vacation, you were to have your memory erased and all your pictures and memorabilia confiscated.
Would you pick the same vacation?
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning founder of behavioral economics posed this thought experiment at his recent TED talk.
It's a very intriguing question that raises the notion of a dual self: the self that lives in the present moment, and self that is obscured in memory or imagination.
It also presents an interesting question: are we capturing memories or are we purposefully designing them?
There’s talk of the “Instagram Generation,” those born after 1980 who, in posting perfectly posed pictures with the right amount of nostalgic filtering, are in fact architects of their future memories.
It seems that even as we plan something, we are simultaneously anticipating the memories we expect to get out of it.
Whether it’s polaroids from the '70s or social media today, the way we choose to capture memories is in line with how our sense of self fits into the spectrum of present, past, and future.
According to Kahneman, we have two selves: the experiencing self and the remembering self.
The experiencing self knows only the present moment.
The remembering self is a storyteller (“that was a good hike”; “that was a bad flight”), and it can dictate our actions when we think of the future as an anticipated memory (“that will be a fun trip”).
- https://www.headspace.com/articles/remembering-vs-experiencing
“Duration Neglect”: the remembering self tends to neglect the duration of experiences and instead focuses on the peak moments and the end. This is known as the “peak-end rule.”
I’ve been using Ten Percent Happier (the free version) in recent days and found myself using this question as a filter when deciding which meditations I wanted to click:
Which one do I think will be most unusual?
Which will twist my brain and shift my perspective?
(Which won’t be just “more of the same”?)And then I wonder:
Should I be able to be present (and “find miracles”) regardless of what meditation I choose?1
Why do I feel the need for it to be “special” in some way?
Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?
From Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis:
It is a common assumption of everyday conversation that people can provide accurate answers to questions about their feelings, both past (e.g. ‘How was your vacation?’) and current (e.g. ‘Does this hurt?’).
Although the distinction is mostly ignored, the two kinds of questions are vastly different.
Introspective evaluations of past episodes depend on two achievements that are not required for reports of immediate experience: accurate retrieval of feelings and reasonable integration of experiences that are spread over time.
The starting point for this chapter is that the retrieval and the temporal integration of emotional experiences are both prone to error, and that retrospective evaluations are therefore less authoritative than reports of current feelings.
We first consider the dichotomy between introspection and retrospection from several perspectives, before discussing its implications for a particular question: how would we determine who is happier, the French or the Americans?
Two selves
An individual’s life could be described—at impractical length—as a string of moments.
A common estimate is that each of these moments of psychological present may last up to 3 seconds, suggesting that people experience some 20,000 moments in a waking day, and upwards of 500 million moments in a 70-year life.
Each moment can be given a rich multidimensional description.
An individual with a talent for introspection might be able to specify current goals and ongoing activities, the present state of physical comfort or discomfort, mental content, and many subtle aspects of subjective experience, of which valence is only one.
What happens to these moments?
The answer is straightforward: with very few exceptions, they simply disappear.
The experiencing self that lives each of these moments barely has time to exist.
When we are asked ‘how good was the vacation’, it is not an experiencing self that answers, but a remembering and evaluating self, the self that keeps score and maintains records.
Unlike the experiencing self, the remembering self is relatively stable and permanent.
It is a basic fact of the human condition that memories are what we get to keep from our experience, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.
Kahneman’s ideas of the remembering self and experiencing self resonate with me.
And there is a tension.
An uncle of mine told me years ago “I don’t take photos. I never want to sacrifice the current moment by trying to collect evidence or design a memory.”
But many people so enjoy the moment of gathering around photos (at some time in the future, which is then the present) and bonding over the story of the experience.
So for them, taking photos (and architecting the events that are photo-worthy) is really just a form of planning for future events (of savoring them later).
On the other hand, many meditation teachers encourage questioning the idea of “self” at all.
Think about being part of a larger whole.
Like a particle in a weather pattern.
Don’t let your mind drift to the past or future, and don’t personalize or identify with your experience in the now.
I’m open to finding that waaayy zoomed out zen perspective appealing someday, but for now I’ll try just to be mindful of the balance of experiencing self and remembering self.
How do you think about it?
When have you optimized for your remembering self, sacrificing your current experience because you knew it would make for a better memory?
🗨️ Quote of the day
“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
- Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
🕙 Recent posts:
🟢 I'll take little kids over pro athletes every time
🟢 Why my therapist’s smile surprised me
👀 Caught my eye this week:
Entertaining and thought-provoking commencement speech by tennis legend Roger Federer:
“In tennis, perfection is impossible...
In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches...
Now, I have a question for all of you... what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?
Only 54%.
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.
When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.
You teach yourself to think: OK, I double-faulted. It’s only a point.
OK, I came to the net and I got passed again. It’s only a point.
Even a great shot, an overhead backhand smash that ends up on ESPN’s Top Ten Plays: that, too, is just a point.
Here’s why I am telling you this.
When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world.
But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you... This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point… and the next one after that… with intensity, clarity and focus.”
— Roger Federer
(25m03s video)
I think I’ll aim for the extraordinary, thought-provoking meditations for the foreseeable future. I’m not some zen master who is able to appreciate regardless of conditions. 😉