Speaking of Two Selves
One that lives and one that remembers
My wife and I let go of our fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel Scotch on Tuesday.
I borrowed an evaluation framework from a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist to appraise his life. Scotch was happy in life if—
He spent most of his time engaged in activities that he would rather continue than stop, little time in situations he wished to escape, and—very important because life is short—not too much time in a neutral state in which he would not care either way.
✔Scotch spent a lot of time chomping on things, not as a carnivorous predator would, but as a cocker spaniel with teething issues would. As a puppy, he continued to eat the basket he would sleep in, little by little, until it was there no more. Once, a friend’s five-year-old son gave him a squeaky hippo. He kept nibbling at it like a school of piranhas until it vanished a day later. He would love shredding stress balls to bits, as if to challenge us, ‘How dare you think you need one in life while I’m here?’
✔Scotch enjoyed himself socially with members of the human species. He would walk up to you, sniff you, lick your legs, and, until his own legs could prop him up, dry-hump you (even though he was neutered). A telling sign that he enjoyed the company of his human friends was that he would literally be the center of the party. He would plonk himself in the mise en scène and force the cast, often inebriated, to step over him or go around him. Scotch was less himself around members of the canine species. He would expect them to give him a wide berth but then that time was, as a percentage of his life time, a tiny sliver.
✔And finally, for most of his life, Scotch steered clear of neutral. He was either in top gear—bounding down passages and bouncing off surfaces during games of fetch. Or when not gamboling, he loved his sleep and would slip into a vegetative state outside his peak hours. During those times, if the floor had to be swept or the furniture had to be moved, you would be foolish to expect Scotch to dislodge himself. He expected you to understand enough to just push him to the side and get on with your housekeeping. It was only COVID that introduced him to neutral (shorn of human company and trips) but that was much later in life, when he was in his twilight years. So, all things considered, neutral didn’t suit him either.
By all measurable accounts, Scotch was happy. How can you dispute my evaluation?
A bizarre discovery
When Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman started studying how we experience and remember pain and pleasure and the nature of well-being and happiness, he saw signs around him that suggested to him that the way we remember is an unreliable compass for making decisions about things we want to experience in life. And that we’re not looking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in every moment—or, we would be forever in a pool with a martini in hand.
He ran experiments that yielded strange data, such as:
1️⃣Patients’ self-reported minute-by-minute experience of pain during colonoscopies (a painful procedure in the early 1990s) did not match their final assessment of the total amount of pain experienced during the procedure. The final assessment suggested that they preferred longer procedures and a higher overall quantum of pain.
2️⃣Participants when asked to choose between keeping their hands dipped in cold water (14℃) for 60 seconds versus hands dipped in cold water (same temperature) for 60 seconds and then in slightly warmer water for an additional 30 seconds preferred to repeat the longer version of the exercise.
Were these people masochistic? Were they not mentally intact? No. Kahneman distilled his findings down to two things:
Peak-end effect - People judge an experience by just two points—the most intense part of the experience (its emotional peak, whether good or bad) and its end.
Duration neglect - People seem to ignore the duration of the experience in their overall judgment.
Kahneman’s findings implied that memories are maps of reality, not reality. Memories don’t have a one-to-one correspondence with reality, and thank heavens for that. Or our heads would explode with irrelevant details and our movies would be the most mundane reality shows ever.
Our memories don’t follow any kind of a consistent scale either. Our brains tend to record emotional peaks and troughs much more than emotional flatland. They also recall the end more deeply.
A patchy scale makes for a dubious map. It makes us unreliable narrators of our own story. We mis-remember.
👉We may forget months of disgruntlement at the job and recall only the celebratory send-off at the end.
👉We may enjoy several seasons of our favorite web series but only ever talk about its botched-up finale.
👉Our national team may win a world cup for the first time in a culmination of years of blood and sweat but the only thing we’ll remember is a forced kiss.
Two selves
The peak-end effect and duration neglect surprised Kahneman. If the memory of an experience is not an honest summary of the feelings evoked during the experience, perhaps there are two selves at work:
An experiencing self that does the living and a remembering self that does the decision-making.
Feelings are real-time reports of what we go through from moment to moment. Yet, when answering life satisfaction surveys, we don’t browse through these reports, average our hourly evaluation scores, and confirm our answers. We say what comes to mind, and, thanks to the peak-end rule and duration neglect, what comes to mind is a global rating fed by the emotional peaks and recent events.
Any question on life satisfaction therefore appeals to the remembering self, bypassing the experiencing self that felt all those feelings moment to moment. Much the same way, any decision on a future experience relies on our past impressions of similar experiences (or what we hear from others), but not on the experiences themselves.
It’s like we go through an entire experience lasting a meaningful chunk of time, tell a stranger about only two points in it, and then let her make future decisions for us based on those two moments.
We are all memory-impaired. It sounds bizarre, but it’s only acceptable perhaps because we all are.
❓That brings us all to a crossroads: Should we design our life for experiences OR for memories of those experiences?
What the world remembers, it rewards but…
On the day of, Scotch’s vet of several years who saw him through asked for chairs to make us comfortable, handed us tissues as we cried our eyes out, asked us if we wanted him to ourselves for one last time, and even slipped in a joke to distract us as she injected the pentobarbital.
The emotional heft of nothing that she did was obvious. It had to be felt. Had she instead waived off our parking fee, handed us a fat discount, or made the story more shareable in any obvious way, anyone would have called that going above and beyond.
That would also have been a lot easier to do (and worthier of a recognition by her employer).
The world takes more seriously the job of commoditizing memory-making. But the value in elevating the lived experience through empathy is left to chance, and to individual grace. Ironically, it is by elevating the lived experience that those in service can give recipients the best memories. Just as we received in our lowest moment.
How to design a life
Days before he passed away from cancer in 1996, psychologist Amos Tversky (who launched the field of behavioral economics with Kahneman) wrote this to his son Oren.
I feel that in the last few days we have been exchanging anecdotes and stories with the intention that they will be remembered, at least for a while. I think there is a long Jewish tradition that history and wisdom are being transmitted from one generation to another not through lectures and history books, but through anecdotes, funny jokes, and appropriate jokes.
When my wife and I made the decision to let Scotch go, we did not know of Tversky’s profound words. Yet, we knew we wanted to give ourselves and all those who loved Scotch space to say goodbye. The only departure from Tversky’s template was in our sharing of less-than-appropriate jokes about Scotch.
And just as well, even though we could no longer change our experience of him any more, we could give ourselves something sublime to remember him by, at least for a while.
Sharing our memories of him, we ended up with a week full of campfire stories, now collected in a book. I had a sense that early on Scotch must’ve had a hunch that his human friends had minds like sieves. He figured the antidote to his forgetful masters was filling every moment with beauty and grace and love.
When people do things for people it can sometimes take the form of doing things that embellish the recipients’ stories, without as much concern for their lived experience. You can bequeath to someone an inheritance and change the narrative of their life forever, without ever spending a day with them or asking them how they were.
It can be hard to care for those who have lost the ability to construct memories. If they can no longer maintain a narrative of their life, what can we possibly do for them?
Living with and caring for is much harder and that’s just what Scotch did. He gave us the best of him, no matter what. He was our companion in wartime and peacetime. He did not design our user experience such that it left us happy at important points along the way and made us want to come back because of those carefully-timed highs.
His only yardstick was happiness in the moment, every moment. He asked for and delivered joy every moment. We saw that in a wagging tail, in salty licks, and, when there was food involved, in dogged pawing. That’s the story. The only one there was and will ever be.
PS: Every day of his life, Scotch put our experiencing and remembering selves in a quandary. Should we enjoy the moment with him or capture it for posterity? I think we got to do both, or rather he gave us enough to savor in the moment as well as cherish later. Here are a few vignettes from his story:
