Tyranny of our Remembering selves

I was catching up over a cup of coffee with my elder brother when I happened to see the biggest dog I had seen yet in my life. I quickly told my brother to get his phone out because mine happened to be dead.

He looked at me calmly and said these exact words: “Why? Are you in tyranny of your remembering self?”

I gave him a blank look. Frankly, I was dumbfounded. I asked him to explain what he meant and that was how I got to know about the tyranny of remembering self. At first, it did not make sense to me at the time, per say, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Tyranny of remembering self refers to the idea that to most people, the most wonderful experiences have little or no value if those experiences cannot be remembered. This is the reason we are so obliged, so caught up, so determined to take pictures of each and everything: desperate to catch hold of the moment.

As pointed out by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking: Fast and Slow”, we seem to have two selves, an experiencing self and a remembering self.

“The Experiencing self is the one that answers the question: does it hurt now? The remembering self is the one that answers the question: how was it, on the whole?” Memories are all we get from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that make decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”

-Psychologist Daniel Kahneman

I think we’ve all fallen into the tyranny of our remembering selves deeper after the digital age and the era of the smartphone. It is so damn easy to click pictures of everything with your phone with you all the time, unlike the old times when you had to own a good camera for pictures. It has made us take moments for granted, time for granted. We are so intrigued, so involved in capturing the moment in pictures or videos that we do not actually enjoy the moment.

We do this a lot. I’m guilty, you’re guilty; we’re all guilty. We’ve all fallen into the tyranny of our remembering selves.

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