"In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else — I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms — whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred."
Adam Phillips quoted by Maria Popova, in The Poetics of The Psyche
Showing posts with label 20th Century Women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 20th Century Women. Show all posts
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Remembering memories, and happiness vs well being
The riddle of experience vs. memory | Daniel Kahneman
The experiencing self lives it's life continuously. And it has moments of experience one after the other.
What happens to these moments? ... The psychological present is said to be 3 seconds long...
– They are lost forever. Most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self.
What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important.
The biggest difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self is the handling of time.
Time, has very little impact on the story.
But... It's the remembering self that makes decisions... We go on vacations in the service of the remembering self.
Why do we put so much weight on memory, relative to the weight we put on experience?
So... The two selves bring up two concepts of happiness.
The happiness of the remembering self is not about how happily a person lives. It's about how satisfied or pleased a person is when that person thinks about her life.
The main lesson that we (researchers) have learnt is that they're REALLY different. You can know how satisfied a person is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life.
We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like. Spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures but this is dominant.
We should not think of happiness as a substitute for well being. It is a completely different notion.
It is very difficult to think straight about well being.
We do not attend to the same things when we think about life and when we actually live.
