The book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read recently, as it touches on how the human mind is not as rational as we would like it to be and discussed several thinking models which gives rise to these cognitive dissonances. In this book, there are several modes for explaining the dichotomy of the human mind: system I vs system II, econ vs humans, and experiencing vs remembering self. In the spirit of learning from past experience, I want to touch on the experiencing vs remembering self in this writing.
The experiencing self is quite self-explanatory, as it is how we think about the experience as they happen to us. If you are asked to immerse yourself in cold water and to rate your discomfort in one minute interval, then that is the experiencing self. The remembering self, on the other hand, is used when we look back at our experience. It is how we look back at the experience of staying in the cold water after we get out and dry ourself. This side of the mind apparently pays more attention to certain aspects of our memory instead of treating it objectively.
When we are faced with decision making, we look back at our past experience to decide what would be the best course of action we can take. We typically look at things from a reward and punishment perspective: how can we make our decision so that we minimize discomfort and maximize reward. However, as mentioned above, humans are not truly rational due to the way the remembering self works.
If we solely rely on our experiencing self, then the overall value of our past experience would be the summation of the score throughout the duration of our experience. Consider these two examples:
A. Jane Doe lived for 65 years. She lived an affluent life and throughout her life she never had any financial issues.
B. Jane Doe lived for 70 years. For 65 years she lived an affluent life and throughout her life she never had any financial issues . However, during the last five years of her life a recession occurred and she had to cut back spending and live a frugal life.
Objectively speaking, if life experience can be put into a score of 1-10 , then example B is better than example A because Jane has the exact same 65 years as example A with an additional five years of life added, resulting in a higher score. However, we tend to believe that example A is better than example B because we put more emphasis towards the end of Jane’s life.
Back to the cold water example, consider the following case:
A. We are immersed in cold water for 5 minutes
B. We are immersed in cold water for 5 minutes, but we get an additional 2 minutes where the water temperature is gradually raised into a more comfortable range
Although option B is objectively worse as we stayed longer within the cold water, we tend to look at option B more favorably as it has a “good ending”.
This is where our cognitive dissonance comes from. Instead of putting uniform weight throughout the duration of the experience, the remembering self focuses on the extreme value of the experience and put more weight towards the end of the experience.
While we would like to think of ourselves as rational human beings who put more emphasis in the experiencing self, in reality the remembering self is the dominant part in decision making. This can lead us to choose options that may be objectively worse, but has less extreme values.
This weird feature of the human mind can also be utilized for properly designing human experience. For example, medical procedure can be tweaked in such way to ensure the patients’ well-being. The focus can be shifted into minimizing extreme pain instead of shortening the duration of the treatment, and make sure that towards the end of the treatment the discomfort can be tapered off.
In terms of personal development, I believe that being aware of this fact can encourage me to work harder. Sure, during the working-hard phase it might feel awful and there’s always the temptation to take the easy way out and quit. However, as long as the extremes of the experience is not that severe – meaning I’m not left incapacitated or scarred emotionally – then hard work is still manageable.
In my experience with intermittent fasting, the fasting period is really tedious as I experience hunger pangs and low energy. Later on, once I reached my target weight, I’m left with my result and the all the hassles of doing intermittent fasting just fade into memories.
So it’s always a good idea to take advantage of how to the remembering self works in both decision making and designing your efforts to maximize results while minimizing pain.
Life as I Frame it 