Are our choices aimed at the life we want or the life we want to tell (ourselves)?

Life is not what one lived, but rather what one remembers, and how it is remembered to tell the tale.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Living to Tell the Tale).

My first real job involved advising Latin-American and African governments on the management of their public debt. It was a fascinating topic, but it took place at an investment bank, which meant dedicating all, or nearly all, my time and energy to clients and projects.

This led to an absurdly busy professional schedule and life, full of work trips, evenings and weekends spent on the job.

But it was part of the “culture” in investment banking: you had to be available at all times, be it to reply to an email or return a presentation, take a trip across the world at the drop of a hat and demonstrate your flawless devotion.

Like many of my colleagues, I was constantly tired of my schedule and complained a lot. I hated having to last-minute cancel the vast majority of dinners, weekends, and lunches that I would naively plan from time to time.

With my plans often falling through, I ended up not organising much outside of work anymore, limiting myself to going out with other people from the bank and modelling my desires on theirs (eating out at chic restaurants during the week, return trips to New York for a weekend, designer clothing, etc.). I appreciated the privilege it was to have my job and saw the professional and social opportunities it offered me.

Like everyone else, I let myself get drunk on the luxury and power we bathed in, the feeling of being on top of the world without even trying. But deep down, I knew — from the beginning — that I wasn’t made for all that. I hated my lack of freedom, time, and flexibility.

I adopted customs and habits that flattered my pride but diluted my personality. I didn’t feel like I belonged. In short, this time should not have left me with good memories.

Like everyone else, I let myself get drunk on the luxury and power we bathed in, the feeling of being on top of the world without even trying. But deep down, I knew — from the beginning — that I wasn’t made for all that.

However, a few months ago, the senior associate who first recruited me invited me to his leaving party.

As I couldn’t go, I decided to write him a little note, in which I surprised myself by confessing that the three years I spent there were the most intense of my life, and some of the most beautiful. Strangely, it was true.

Because, when I think back to these years with a bit of distance, I am overcome by incredible images and memories. I am transported back to the luxurious garden at the Camino Real Hotel in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where, freshly recruited, I spent two months working for the Ministry of Hydrocarbons.

I think back to the long evenings when my colleague and I would devour sushi delivered in plastic boxes by the best restaurants in town in our shared office, eyes glued to our computer screens, easing our pain by listening to Tom Waits at full volume.

I can still feel the tension and adrenaline of that never-ending, all-night meeting in London, when Ecuador’s Minister of Finance tearily walked around in her socks, desperate to find a deal with the investors before dawn. I see the hundreds and hundreds of roses that decorated the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Addis Ababa, contrasting with the pitiful fake flowers in the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance meeting rooms.

I smile thinking back to the wedding ceremony of the niece of Angola’s Minister of Finance, where a colleague and I were invited to try sticky maggot soup. I can see us again, my faithful “office mate” and I, arriving at work on Wednesday morning with six-packs of Coke, to help us recover from either a long night of work or an impulsive night out. 

I adopted customs and habits that flattered my pride but diluted my personality. I didn’t feel like I belonged. In short, this time should not have left me with good memories.

ll these memories, permanent marks from the biggest moments during three years in the life of an investment banker, have now overshadowed the more mediocre moments that made up my daily life.

These intense memories, fixed in my mind, outshine the hours of boredom, frustration and fatigue I experienced day after day. And I can’t help but ask myself if the emotion that these memories spark in me is faithful to what I felt at the time, or if it has gone through the rose-tinted filter of nostalgia.

In other words, was I really happy when I worked at the bank, or am I only happy and proud of the memories that I made?

The “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”

“Life is not what one lived, but rather what one remembers, and how it is remembered to tell the tale”, wrote Garcia Marquez in Living to Tell the Tale.

Psychologist and Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman theorised this dissonance between lived experience in the present and the memory it leaves, demonstrating the existence of two selves: the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”.

The experiencing self lives exclusively in the present, going through moments of daily life with varying amounts of pleasure or pain. This is the self that gets bored in a long queue, enjoys a delicious meal, or yells at their kids on Sunday evening.

The remembering self is the self that retains memories, revisits the past and writes the story. This is the self that tells itself it’s happy to have waited hours in line to buy the latest iPhone, once the new toy is in hand, the one that doesn’t remember the steep bill at the restaurant and describes its children’s first years with nostalgia.

The experiencing self simply lives in the present. The remembering self creates stories based on what it retains from experiences it’s gone through.

And this is where the two selves can come into conflict: while the present self exists in the only reality possible, the remembering self builds itself from a highly selective memory that’s vulnerable to cognitive bias.

To demonstrate this, Kahneman uses the results of an experiment. In the first part, people have to keep their hands immersed in water at 14 degrees celsius for 60 seconds. In the second part, the same people have to keep their hands in water at 14 degrees for 60 seconds, then 30 extra seconds in the water now heated to 15 degrees.

A few minutes later, they were asked to choose which experiment they would prefer to repeat. The vast majority chose the second, though it was quantitatively longer and more uncomfortable than the first — keeping your hand in water at 15° is still unpleasant. How can this choice be reasoned?

As Kahneman explains, we tend to only retain three kinds of moments from our experiences: moments that involve change, intense moments, and final moments, i.e., the way in which experiences finish. Our narratives are built from these markers. More unusual moments and how they finish will therefore have a significant influence on the memories that we create from our experiences.

This subconscious mechanism explains why I still have great memories of my investment banking years, which were essentially hard, ridiculous, and tiring, interspersed with exciting moments and finished with gratitude, while I retain unpleasant memories of my time as a Swiss entrepreneur, which was fulfilling in the day-to-day, but featured few “highlights”, and ended with frustration and disappointment.

When we make decisions, it’s the remembering self at the controls. We assess the attractiveness of potential future scenarios in light of memories created from our past experiences and then choose one.

The impact of this dissonance on our choices

We don’t choose between multiple experiences, explains Kahneman, but rather between several memories of our experiences. And when we make decisions, it’s the remembering self at the controls. We assess the attractiveness of potential future scenarios in light of memories created from our past experiences and then choose one.

But where it gets complicated is that the experiencing self and the remembering self don’t have the same vision of happiness. And this is because being “happy in life” (the experiencing self’s goal) is not the same thing as being “happy with your life” (the remembering self’s goal).

The remembering self will be happy to have achieved objectives, earned money, reached a certain status, and bought a big house in the sun. As for the experiencing self, or the present self, it will be happy if it has time to spend on leisure, see friends and enjoy moments with family.

Because contrary to what you might think, beyond a certain level of comfort, neither success, nor money, nor good weather will have a real impact on the present self’s wellbeing.

The experiencing self, on the other hand, will very probably feel happier if it decides to move to a sunny place or accept a better-paid job, because this new situation seems objectively preferable, even if it is not necessarily the case in the present.

The experiencing self and remembering self do not value the same things: while the first aspires to a life with a pleasant daily routine, the second aspires to a life that will provide satisfaction in its future retelling.

“Evaluation and memory are important on their own because they play a significant role in decisions, and because people care deeply about the narrative of their life. On the other hand, an exclusive focus on retrospective evaluations is untenable if these evaluations do not accurately reflect the quality of actual experience,” wrote Kahneman in a 2005 article titled “Living, and Thinking about It: Two Perspectives on Life”.

However, this is clearly very often what happens: when it comes to making a decision, we continue to prioritise the narrative of our life rather than the actual experience of it.

This is shown, for example, by people’s choices of holiday destinations, which is increasingly influenced by Instagram (a 2017 survey performed in the United Kingdom established that over 40% of Millenials choose their holiday destination according to its “Instagrammability”). No matter whether you have to elbow through a crowd of tourists to take a photo at the top of a cliff: the important thing is the photo and the story that you’re left with.

This is also often reflected in our career choices. Telling the story of our work gives us satisfaction (I’m a CEO, I travel a lot, I earn X amount, etc.) but we often do not enjoy it in the day-to-day.

So, the question is, what would happen if we thought differently and prioritised the experiencing self rather than the remembering self when it came to making a decision? Would we opt for the same jobs, houses, objectives, and destinations?

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This article was first published on Medium.