The Remembering Self and the Experiencing Self: A Paradox to Happiness Hackers

In the TED Talk below, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Inventor of Behavioral Economics, explains how our happiness is determined and sometimes distorted by what he describes as our two selves.

The Way a Story Ends

We must be conscious of the way a story ends in our memories. A bad ending can make our Remembering Self permanently unhappy about an otherwise very happy experience. Therefore, it's essential to recognize and compartmentalize a negative ending in what's going to be a memory narrative.

Storytime

In between Panama and Colombia, there are 300 islands that are strangely omitted on Google Maps — or any of the other maps I’ve seen of the southern Caribbean.

A personal experience:In 2012, I took one of the coolest vacations of my life. While traveling from Central to South America, I spent four days in the surreal San Blas Islands (between Panama and Colombia). It was a time of relaxation on sunny beaches, meeting the locals of the islands (and even learning a little of their language), eating great food, drinking fine wine and rum by bonfires, making new friends, and snorkeling in clear waters. However, it ended with two fairly disastrous events: 1) At the border crossing, my passport was almost ruined by water damage, and 2) On our first night in Colombia, we got robbed.

When these two negative events happened, I made a conscious decision to categorize them as simply part of the risks of travel and not include them in my mental narrative of the San Blas Islands vacation.

Memory anticipation feedback loops - Our remembering self is in charge of making decisions based on future anticipated memories. We derive a lot of happiness from these self-fulfilling prophecies, so if there's a decision you need to make, imagine yourself being happy in the future, reflecting on the decision.

Spend time with people you like - and who make you feel good about yourself. It's the most significant measurable factor of happiness.

Make it to $60,000 - It turns out money does buy happiness, but the happiness-to-income correlation flattens out at $60,000 a year for Americans and other comparable countries. So, do whatever it takes to get your income to $60,000/yearly, but after that, focus on other areas of your life to maximize happiness.

Thought Experiment

At the end of a vacation, all your pictures are going to be destroyed, and you will receive a drug that gives you amnesia. All your memories of the vacation are going to be destroyed. Would you choose the same activities?

If so, then it illustrates a significant difference between the way your Remembering Self and your Experiencing Self perceive happiness.

My question for Dr. Kahneman is, do biological happiness and healthiness correlate more to the Experiencing Self or the Remembering Self? Should we, as biohackers, be more focused on maximizing Experiential Happiness or creating Happy Memories?

0:30 - Over 40 books published in the last 5 years with happinessin the title; happiness is researched thoroughly
1:07 - 1st Trap of Happiness is a reluctance to admit complexity; the wordhappinessis too general, and we need to adopt a more complex view
1:30 - 2nd Trap Confusion Between Experience and Memory, being happy in your life and being happy about your life
1:50 - 3rd Trap Focusing Illusion, we cannot think about any factor of well-being without distorting its significance.
2:55 - The two selves; theExperiencing Self  (in the present), the Remembering Self(keeps score of our life). They are very different.
3:45 - The notion of happiness gets confused between the two selves.
5:30 - Example from medical operations: when the story or memory that ended in pain is negatively colored, the entire dialog
6:50 - The ending of the story makes the biggest difference.
7:20 - The psychological present is about 3 seconds long.
7:40 - TheRemembering Selfonly focuses on very few of these
8:08 - The biggest difference between the two selves is the handling of time.
9:00 - TheRemembering Self is the one that makes decisions, the Experiencing Selfhas very little to do with the decision making process.
9:40 - We think of our future as anticipated memories. We live at the tyranny of theRemembering Self.
11:15 - Thought Experiment: At the end of vacation, all your pictures are going to be destroyed, and you will receive an amnesiac drug. All your memories of the vacation are going to be destroyed. Would you choose the same activities?
13:56 - A person's moment-to-moment happiness (theExperiencing Self) can vary drastically from the happiness they feel when they think about their life (the Remembering Self).
14:50 - The biggest factor of happiness is spending time with people we like.
15:00 - We should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being.
17:17 - Happiness of theExperiencing Self for Americans, below $60,000/Yearly people are unhappy, above $60,000/Yearly money does not buy you happiness - the Experiencing Self's happiness graph goes flat.

The paradox of happiness is that the more you pursue and worry about happiness, the less happy you'll be. I explain why here...