Post No.: 0959
Furrywisepuppy says:
Stories are about significant and salient events. These become the memorable moments in our lives. A story doesn’t just recall time passing, thus duration neglect is pretty normal – we don’t talk about having our fur brushed that day or the walkies to the park but we talk about the magnificent travelling circus we witnessed there. And in stories, the ending matters greatly – the outcome of a penalty shootout will shape how we’ll remember the entire match, as either a bunch of missed opportunities or as worth all that training and effort.
The way we remember anything depends on how well their results turned out. In stories, the ending defines the end of a character arc and the resolution of the plot dynamics, and we generally like happy endings whilst we don’t really care about happy or unhappy beginnings or middles. This is how the ‘remembering self’ works – it composes stories and keeps them for future reference. The length of a life matters less than the key moments – legends can die young too. We can feel deeply affected even by events that change the narrative of those who are already dead (e.g. we can feel the pity or humiliation of a TV personality who was posthumously revealed to be a sex offender, even though they never experienced that pity or humiliation in their own experiential life).
The word ‘memorable’ is often used to describe only the highlights. The declaration that ‘this present moment will never be forgotten’ (although not always prescient) will also change the value of a moment – a self-consciously memorable experience gains a significance that it otherwise wouldn’t have had.
Caring for people takes a form of concern for the quality of their stories, not their experiential feelings per se (e.g. we push people hard in order to bring the best out of them). Most of all, we care intensely about the narrative of our own furry life and want it to be a good story and legacy.
In between-subjects experiments, a person who lives with 60 years of bliss won’t be deemed as having any more total happiness in their life compared to a person who just lives with 30 years of bliss. Even in within-subjects experiments, a person who lives with 30 years of bliss plus 10 years of less bliss before they died will be deemed as having less total happiness in their life compared to someone who just lives the 30 years of bliss then died. People, without intention or conscious awareness, substitute the question of ‘total happiness’ with the ‘prototypical/average happiness’ of a person’s life. So less can be more if more means dragging down the average even if it increases the absolute total. Yet do be on guard against this irrationality because more should logically mean more. Severe pain might be different though because it can have a subtractive effect.
With something like childbirth labour or holidays, it may seem to be the case that duration matters, but this is only because the quality of the ending progressively changes with the length of the episode – the mother is more depleted the longer the labour lasts and a holidaymaker feels more refreshed at the end of a longer holiday. Relatedly, the last link in a chain of events that tips something over the edge or line is usually given too much emphasis (e.g. the last clue that gives us an ‘aha’ response to a problem will likely be disproportionately credited compared to all the previous clues that also helped, or the player who taps the ball into the net after a series of clinical passes from the rest of that player’s team will receive most of the credit).
The amount of photographs and videos taken by people suggests that the storing of memories is often an important goal in life, and it shapes both people’s holiday plans and their experiences of their vacations. Tourism is about helping people construct stories and collect memories!
Photos and video recordings may be useful to the remembering self (although we actually rarely look at them again as much as we think we’ll do!) – but holding a camera up, obscuring part of one’s view, isn’t the best way for one’s experiencing self to enjoy such moments.
People can spend days waiting until they see a brief spectacular event, like an aurora – the total duration waiting doesn’t matter as much as whether the ending was worthwhile. This can all be for better or worse, for the journey is often more important than the destination. Our present, experiencing, self is really the one experiencing the beauty of the world and doing the living, and being more present is linked to better mental health for we can dwell on the past or fantasise about the future too much. Nevertheless, humans are more intuitively remembering-self-biased.
So we live to remember, not to experience per se. We’re able to ‘relive’ feelings we’ve had in a past situation if it’s retrieved in sufficiently vivid detail – but our memories and their associated memories can be reshaped by later interpretations too. Few would pay for an enjoyable holiday where after which one’s memories will be wiped clean of the experience and all recordings of the event will be destroyed. Some wouldn’t mind going through an immensely painful operation where one will remain conscious if there’s a drug that’ll completely wipe clean all memory of the event.
‘You’ are your remembering self, and your experiencing self (who actually does the living) is often treated like a stranger. People’s reputations are stories, hence people can cheat as long as they think that these episodes will remain concealed from the story, and they’ll fight passionately to defend the narrative of a life of integrity. So to enough people in this world, they’re less bothered about committing a crime than being caught, labelled and remembered as a criminal. The perception of truth is in the memory and reputation, not in the act or fact. The story of our remembering self is the one used for managing our social image; the story we believe others will see when they think of us.
Early in the season, a team that produces a thumping win will be judged as having a tremendous chance of winning the league. But will then be judged as not having what it takes if they lose a match in embarrassing fashion soon after. The narrative of any previous narrow victories will also no longer be written as ‘grinding out wins through grit and tenacity’ but as ‘warning signs that the team was struggling to beat most opponents’. In other words, we weight our future narratives too heavily on the most recent or present result, and we can totally rewrite the narratives we gave to past events based on how we feel in the immediate present. Our narratives shape our feelings, predictions, interpretations, worldviews and even identities, and they’re not fixed or objective elements.
‘System one’ substitutes the complex question of ‘How satisfied are you with things as a whole?’ with a simpler question of ‘How happy do I feel right now?’ Hence most people can come up with an answer quite quickly. Priming and other (sometimes irrelevant) momentary effects (like being prompted to think of last weekend’s match or finding a pound coin on the floor) can therefore influence people’s judgements of their own global life satisfaction. ‘What you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI) too so minds can change quickly if one is prompted to think about an aspect of one’s life that one had forgotten about or took for granted (for better or worse, like the fact that one lives with a cute, well-behaved dog or noticing a raging, senseless war in the news).
We know that if someone is presently in a crabby mood, it’s not a good time to ask them for a favour – our current mood affects all our current judgements (‘mood heuristic’) even if the cause of our current mood is totally unrelated to the current judgement we’ve been asked to make. Thus, overall, because of WYSIATI, answers to questions such as one’s ‘overall life satisfaction’ or ‘global well-being’ should usually be taken with a grain of salt. The speed by which people can come to an answer to any complex question shows that they most likely relied on a heuristic – not an absolutely comprehensive and carefully weighted analysis.
Even if significant or chronic events come to mind that affect your assessment, it’ll likely only be a small sample of highly cognitively available events. And even if one did conduct a thorough analysis of one’s own life – whether we compare ourselves to a comatose patient or a movie star will elicit completely different life satisfaction conclusions too. Like happiness, life satisfaction isn’t an objective but a relative and subjective judgement – thus improving your life satisfaction can simply be a matter of just changing perspectives, like comparing yourself to those worse off than you. Woof.
Excluding those in poverty – there’s a low correlation between people’s individual circumstances and their levels of reported happiness or life satisfaction. Some people are happy with seemingly little and some are grumpy with seemingly lots. Some of this is down to their natural temperament but some of it is down to (a lack of proper) perspective. Some people may be financially richer but some people care less about money than others. Some situations aren’t black-or-white positive or negative, like being famous.
So our memories aren’t like faithful recording and recall devices with every single experiential value of every moment in our life summed up to give us our present happiness or life satisfaction state. The remembering self tells stories – but in stories, the beginning, peak and end are the critical moments, and the true representation of time is distorted. This all reflects what was chewed over in Post No.: 0957. ‘Selective/thin-slice attention’ is paid only to the salient moments (e.g. relationship break-ups), and what happens at other moments is neglected (e.g. all the mouth-watering meals you’ve enjoyed in your life). We also fail to account for the withdrawal of attention and hedonic adaptations to novel things over time.
The remembering self will prefer to repeat a decision that left the better memory, even if it may have involved more pain. This may be justified in cases where PTSD is a risk but it’s illogical in every other case. The remembering self is a construction of ‘system two’, but the peak-end rule and duration neglect are features of the way system one handles memories. Time is the ultimate finite resource in our lives thus time matters – but the remembering self neglects it and so acts as a sub-optimal decision-maker.
Anticipated regret (from anticipated hindsight) influences the remembering self. We favour short periods of intense joy over long periods of moderate happiness, and we fear short periods of intense but tolerable pain more than we fear much longer periods of moderate pain. The qualities of endings are over-weighted too.
A holistic assessment of your well-being ought to account for every single moment of your life, with memorable and/or important moments weighted more than others – even moments spent dwelling on memorable moments should be included, adding to their weight; as should moments that gain importance by altering the experience of subsequent moments (e.g. a week learning some art history can enhance the experience of looking at art for many years).
The problem however is that in many cases one can only determine what’ll be memorable, and what’s meaningful, after the fact. Plus real humans do care about their remembering selves and life narratives. Ultimately both one’s day-to-day happiness and evaluations of one’s life satisfaction – both the experiencing and remembering selves – are vital to one’s well-being. They both must be considered.
Yet this can present conflicts of interests without clear solutions – should we be guided by our fears and desires, or by our actual experiences?
Woof.
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