The constant tension between your two selves

At some point in your life (and probably very recently for 99% of the people reading this), you came up with a plan that you loved, and then failed to execute it. Not only did you fail to do the work to execute the plan, you probably had at least one moment when you actively thought to yourself "I should be working on my thing, not watching Netflix!", and then continued watching Netflix.

Sound familiar? That's okay, you're human. And humans are both blessed and cursed to be equipped with the human mind.

One of the most interesting things in the world is surely the human mind, and two of the most influential researchers of the mind in the 20th century were Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, and his research partner Amos Tversky (who surely would also have won the Nobel for his contributions to the same work had he not died before the award was bestowed. For whatever reason, the Nobel Prize is never awarded post-humously...)

Kahneman and Tversky essentially invented the field of behavioural economics. They identified and studied many of the heuristics (mental shortcuts) that human minds make, and the biases that reliably appear as a result. It's a truly fascinating topic, and a humbling one to boot, when you recognise yourself committing the kinds of acts of irrationality that they predict you will.

If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, the person from a field of thousands who I think has done the best job of popularising the ideas pioneered by Kahneman and Tversky and made them relevant and accessible to laypeople like you and me.

One of the most interesting insights to be gleaned from the work of Kahneman and Tversky is the idea that the human mind combines two completely different selves; the experiencing self, and the remembering self. Additionally, they made the rather profound claim that these two selves—present in every human being—have completely different goals and motivations.

The experiencing is present moment to moment. It is the self that experiences life. The experiencing self has no real conception of past or future, and is optimised to exist in the present. Additionally, it seeks to optimise the present experience to suit itself.

On the other hand, the remembering self is the being that thinks about experiencing life. The remembering self is a storyteller. It is the self that authors the narrative of your life, that remembers significant moments from the past, and imagines possible futures both desirable and undesirable. (I find it mildly annoying that they chose to call this self "the remembering self" since its use of memory is only part of the whole picture. Personally I think "the narrative self" or "the continuous self" might have been a better label, but I'll continue to call it the remembering self in respect to the work of those that identified it).

Your remembering self has plans. Big ideas. Goals. It's thinking about who you've been, who you are, and who you want to be. It imagines the outcomes possible if you were to compound the effects of large numbers of very small gains over long periods of time.

Your remembering self is the one that imagines what it might be like to be on the far side of a year in the gym, or six months of Spanish lessons (at least, those are two possible futures my remembering self is projecting itself into, I'm sure you have similar ideas you are conjuring at the moment).

I'm sure it varies for everyone, but I can certainly say that in my case, the remembering self is highly optimistic. I find myself constantly imagining wonderful futures where I have put in the required effort, and am rewarded with amazing results. The remembering self—in my case at least—has absolutely no fear of commitment or hard work. That's probably because, of course, the remembering self doesn’t have to be committed, nor do any of the hard work.

The experiencing self is the one that has to actually show up and do the work.

The problem is, as we mentioned earlier, the experiencing self seeks to optimise the present to suit itself. And frankly, why shouldn't it? If you could be wet, cold, and uncomfortable; or warm, toasty and dry; which would you choose!? The experiencing self wants to enjoy every moment because of course, that's all it can ever enjoy. It can come to resent the remembering self, who seems to loom large over it and demand that it spend every moment delaying gratification in order to experience some wondrous future state.

"Why be happy speaking Spanish in six months when I can be happy reading Twitter now?", it asks.

So, if you find yourself occasionally battling the tension between your two selves, try to be kind to yourself. There's nothing wrong with you, it's literally the way we're built.

And, if you find your experiencing self regularly disobeying the wishes of your remembering self, rather than simply getting angry at yourself, try to use the remembering self to think of ways to sweeten the deal for the experiencing self. Sometimes a little bribery can go a long way!

Finally, please don't make the mistake of resenting your experiencing self. Sometimes the modern success narrative seems to infer that successful people delay gratification indefinitely, and I think this is a gross mistake. The only thing you ever truly have is the experience of the present moment. We should cherish the present like almost nothing else.

My perspective is that the tension between the experiencing self and the remembering self is something that is never static or resolved. It's a dynamic, paradoxical dance.

Have a great weekend. Maybe let your experiencing self run wild for a time.