Some reflections on experiencing vs. remembering

So we recently got to talking about a relatively common, but somewhat perplexing phenomenon – the strange feeling that time is passing both fast and slow at the same time. Consider for example being on an exciting vacation where you experience a lot of new things every day. The days seem to fly by, but at the same time, even though you only left home a few days ago, it feels like you’ve been gone for an eternity. Very relevant for us lately of course, though we hope that others recognize this feeling as well. But what might be causing this contradiction in perception?

Alex recently read Thinking Fast and Slow (thanks to Chris for the great gift) where Daniel Kahneman provides countless insights into the way that we think and make decisions (including bias and heuristics), and reveals some fascinating and often disturbing elements of human psychology. Aside from just being a great read, Kahnemn touches on an interesting framework for understanding the apparent paradox above. In the final chapters he introduces a distinction between two selves, the “experiencing” and the “remembering”. Through a series of real life experiments, he demonstrates that these two selves are not only different, but often at complete odds with each other. We judge past experiences differently than we reported them at the time and we do so in a consistent and measurable way. This opens up all kinds of interesting and sometimes troubling possibilities, but that’s not the point here.

The point is that “time flies when you’re having fun” because your experiencing self is fully engaged. On the other hand, your remembering self has much richer and detailed memories, so that after the fact, time seems to have been much longer. Varying your experiences lengthens time in memory by providing more distinct events to remember but also by marking off the passage of time. On the contrary, spending the whole day in one repetitive or boring activity seems excruciatingly long to the experiencing self, but rather short to the remembering self (there’s not really much to remember).

This leads to a final reflection. For anyone who’s read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, you probably recall one of the more colorful characters, Dunbar, who hilariously tries to promote his own boredom, thinking that he will live longer by forcing time to pass more slowly. While funny on a couple of levels, the true irony lies in the fact that his very attempt to extend time actually accomplishes the opposite. Living a boring life forces your experiencing self to perceive the passage of time more slowly, but at high cost to your remembering self.

So if you truly want to slow down time, fill it with rich, varied and novel experiences. Or in other words, the best way to live a long life is to have fun. And that’s one lesson we plan to live by.