The Remembering Self vs Experiencing Self

Have you ever thought about how you make decisions based on your tastes and preferences? Economists have been exploring this concept in simple models of decision making, which they have defined as utility. In its most simple definition, utility is the amount of satisfaction a good or service provides and is used to model supply and demand. Price can impact our demand of a good to the point that even if it has high utility, we may forgo it. Daniel Kahneman translated this idea into an experience/decision utility model to explore how people make decisions based on their tastes and preferences. In classical economics, rational people make decisions on tastes and preferences that they understand and, therefore, are fairly consistent. This intuitively made sense to me until I read the last chapters in Daniel's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. His results point to a stunning and provocative idea that have significant implications in our careers and life: We actually have two selves that manage our memory, the Experiencing Self and Remembering Self, that predictably distort our memories which shape our tastes and preferences.

Now, imagine you messed up at work. Like really messed up. What does that situation look like for you? Is it screaming and shouting from a boss? Is it a disapproving glare from a group of co-workers? Is it the quiet crickets of a virtual meeting or, worse, room full colleagues? These scenarios give me a cold sweat just writing them. I've had versions of all of them to different degrees. The interesting thing about these memories is that I can clearly remember the peak feeling of dread at a moment in time, but I cannot recall the entire memory itself. The project may have been a positive experience up until that moment where it somehow all fell apart. What is fascinating about the experiencing self is that it doesn't keep track of the entire duration of the memory, only peak moments of intense pleasure or unpleasantness. The remembering self then files away those intense memories and tells you "Avoid those at all costs!" Daniel proved this in various experimental models and his conclusion was that our remembering selves tend to shape our tastes and preferences based on the duration and peak of strong feelings of pain or pleasure. This means that a memory in its entirety may actually be fairly benign, but one bad moment can sour the entire thing. Alternatively, a memory in its entirety may be a very risk activity that you should not pursue again, but a highly positive feeling at the end can make you repeat the risky activity again.

For me, this information has been very practical in my career. I realized I responded too strongly to highs and lows of my job. If a project, meeting, or presentation went poorly, then that memory stuck in my remembering self and I started to avoid it. This is not a good pattern of behavior as there are some activities that you just can't avoid, and a long career requires you to do certain tasks over and over. I was lucky that I read this book early on in my career because I started to focus less on the outcome and intense feelings associated with a work activity and instead on the process itself. I would ask myself how the day to day activities felt and remind myself that really good days were enjoyable, but I shouldn't chase them. This became especially helpful with really bad days where I reminded myself to not be defined by them.

In a previous role, part of my work stream included speaking with thought leaders (physicians and researchers at the top of their field) about my company's medicinal products and ongoing research efforts. The work was very gratifying as my primary aim was to improve patient care by answering questions on the safe and effective use of our medicinal products while also collecting insights on how to develop our clinical trial program to address unmet patient needs. The highs and lows were intense though. Some days I would feel like a peer talking to a nationally known oncologists while other days I would feel like I was wasting someone's time. I found myself struggling on how to effectively manage my schedule because of the fear of being prepared enough in the hopes of avoiding those unpleasant memories of wasting someone's time. Daniel Kahneman's book coupled with meditation helped me realize that the only things I could control were my day-to-day preparation, keeping up to date on internal drug development and external clinical landscape changes, and effectively working with matrix colleagues. In essence, I needed to focus on the parts of my experiencing self that tend to get forgotten by my remembering self. I had to re-train my mind to not focus on the highs and lows so much.