Live for experience or memory?

One of the most startling findings of modern psychology is how bad we are at guessing what will make us happy. Not only are we lousy at predicting what will satisfy us, we often misremember our happiness in the past.

In perhaps one of the best online talks I've ever watched, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman speaks about the difference between the experiencing and remembering selves.

Kahneman's point is that our discussions about the ideal life are often misguided. This is because we confuse two seemingly similar but actually distinct concepts:

The quality of life, as we experience it, moment-to-moment.

The quality of our life, as we remember it and as it is woven in to the narrative of our lives.

The vacation dilemma – is the ideal life lived or just remembered?

The problem is that our experiential happiness is only loosely correlated with how happy we feel when thinking broadly about our lives.

Kahneman gives the example of a two week vacation. Assuming the vacation was equally enjoyable in every moment, then a two week vacation should be twice as good as a one week vacation. After all, there are twice as many moments of experiencing happiness.

However, from the standpoint of memory, a two-week vacation is barely better than a one-week vacation. This is because there are no new memories added in this time, so all the similar moments of happiness are simply forgotten.

Here we have the conflict. Say you're about to decide your next vacation plans, which you're reasonably confident will be satisfying. Should you go for one week or two?

Making the question more interesting, Kahneman asks, would you pick the same vacations if you knew that after, all the pictures would be destroyed and you'd take an amnesiac drug forcing you to forget ever having taken it?

When I talk about the pursuit of the ideal life here on this blog, this revelation asks the question, what constitutes the ideal life? Is it our moment-to-moment experiences or simply the narrative we weave afterward?

The tyranny of the biographer

The difficulty with designing a life, is that your experiencing self doesn't get a vote. It's only the biographer, the part of yourself that remembers the past and predicts the future that gets a say in what careers you pick, vacations you choose and people you spend time with.

This doesn't really seem fair. What you actually would write about your life after it has been lived is merely paper and some ink. It's the slivers of time that pass through our consciousness that feel important.

This problem goes beyond the common experience of doing something for the purpose of talking about it later. Such as people who run marathons to "say they did it." The reason our experiences don't get a vote, is because they've already been taken over by the inner biographer.

We don't base future decisions on experiential happiness because we don't have access to anything but this sliver of now. Everything else has been converted to memories, and subject to all of the biases of the storyteller.

Experiencing the ideal life, instead of simply narrating it

I don't know about you, but I find this biographical tyranny unacceptable. I wouldn't want to invest a lot of time designing a life that I can tell myself is great, but is lousy when I actually experience it. As with all cognitive biases, I don't think there is an easy solution. To err is human, and unfortunately, so is to err systematically.

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