Rational Enough to Make Unbiased Decisions?
Remembering self vs. experiencing self
Story background: I successfully hitchhiked from Romania to Ukraine(a small city called Chernivtsi), Fortunately, one couple Chernivtsi accepted my request and i stayed with them.
I have been loving this platform called Couchsurfing ever since I started to nomad 9 months ago. Until recently, I feel nervous energy bubbled around whenever I see the app on my phone.
And it’s all because of one memory.
I recall having several unsuccessful conversations with my hosts; they are generous human animal indeed, but there was no connection between our conversations. Throughout our conversation, it was just them talking about their boring life non-stop. OMG, they are so good at talking about something down-to-earth that I don’t like(I like creepy, philosophical, controversial, sensitive, private topic.)
The thing is, they do not understand my subtle cue of expressing boredom and since I don’t want to be subjected to their mono-doublelogue(they would interrupt each other and compete to see who can give a longer speech to me).I often pretend to go to the toilet and meditate.
You know what. These are fine:)) I mean, even though I am looking forward to exchanging personal life stories to one another, I can practice to meditate while they are “having a conversation with me”. I can nod my head, I can umm hmm. From time to time say, “Ohh, that’s soooooo interesting”, and they will go on talking for 8 more minutes.
But, what make this experience so bad, so much so that I reevaluate the entire Couchsurfing app as a wasting time platform is their pretentious open-mindedness.
One night before I left my their house, we had a disagreement. Now, I have always been viewing disagreement as something meaningful, interesting even, as most human-animal on Medium would agree. But they showed me this f***ing angry face when I expressed my opinion of their complaints about me. “Naruto, there is no space for you to talk, you are our guest and we’ve suffered from your impolite and weird behavior, we, including our guests were both scared and worried whether or not you are going to harm us, so please, just listen”
“I am sorry that I make this happen and make you feel this way, but I am so curious why do you think I should sit there with you and be present all the time while playing board game? I mean, my eye and body is painful at the moment, I wanted to move, why do you think this is impolite?” I genuinely asked out of curiosity.
“No, Naruto, please, stop all the excuses, it’s enough” My host calmly said.
Their complaints were about me keep moving my body while playing board games with them. They didn’t like me asking interpersonal questions to one of their interesting guest(OMG, so interesting), they think it’s inappropriate based on the reasons that “we” are playing word game and “we” should focus on it. They stopped chatting and started to whisper(gossip) with an anxious face when they saw I was stretching my body and doing eye exercise, they called me weirdo and told me that I made them feel extremely uncomfortable.
Now, all these complaints are entirely plausible and don’t make me emotional( it was interesting to hear)as I put myself in their shoe. “hmm, they live in a small city for years without going anywhere, they’ve traveled quite a lot in the past but they traveled only by using train, zero hitchhike experience, they sleep in queen bed hostel room while traveling and afraid of interacting with locals other than asking road”
What really gets on my nerve is when they don’t let me explain. They “politely and friendly” allow me to talk, but they are not listening. They are preparing their argument while I was explaining.
They emphasized that I scared them in an impolite and profound way (just think of any horrible movie you are scared of).
Even after 7 days while having a relaxing stroll, I could still hear their disapproving voice in my head, and I can confidently tell you that I am a relatively mentally strong and positive human-animal optimist. Still, their words were so strong that they successfully convinced me that I was living wrongly.
“Naruto, why are you existing here, stop bothering us”
Why would I use an app/platform to meet human animal that disapproves of my existence?
Now, shall we introduce our game-changer who shift my perspective entirely on this hosting experience from the worst to “oh damn it was pretty good” ? His name is Daniel Kahneman, a well-known psychologist.
In his book, thinking fast and slow. He referred to the experiencing self and the remembering self. He deduced that most of our decisions are based on remembering self rather than experiencing self. This concept is necessary because it’s plausible that most human-animal would not want to have the experience if they cannot remember it later or photograph it. Most importantly, if our decisions are mostly based on our remembering self(memory), and we tend to remember negative things(thanks to our innate ancestor DNA), we would likely make biased choice. Biased choice is bad because we would cultivate a habit of avoiding certain things or human animal. It is not nice, if we were to explore life as much and as transparent as it is as possible.(This premise is necessary)
I found it quite interesting for me to test his assumption/theory. I decided to take a retrospecting trip to revisit what happened with my host and me 7 days ago. I know it might be horrifying to get to the unpleasant part, it certainly will, but I decided to use braveness for 20 seconds to embrace my fear of recalling unpleasant memory, further use my skill of curiosity that I have been cultivating to retrospect deeper and wider to get the whole honest story.
My mission was to find out the answer: whether or not the experience was bad or good? was it really as bad as I thought? Or is it really like Daniel Kahneman said that my brain fools me?
It turns out(woah) that it’s not true that my experience at their house was bad. I thought their complaint and negative emotions during our last discussion/disagreement is the continuous reminder that we had a bad time.
I was wrong.
Once I looked at my experience by using bird eye angle, step by step to carefully review my experiences hours by hours, I unearthed so many hidden good memories and some minor bad ones.
“Wow, I had several gratitude goosebumps in their house? This is unprecedented!” “Well, although these goosebumps weren’t caused by my hosts but only thanks to them, I could have this experience.” “Woah, how can I forget that my host treated me my favorite food pizza?” “They even respected my choice of reducing non human animal’s suffering by ordering vegetarian pizza?” “Wow they voluntarily invest their time to be my city tour guide?” “Wow so many other good experiences/memories”
Sure, I still feel sad and consider the discussion as bad because they didn’t respect my curiosity and the right to express myself/explanation. But after listing all the goods and bads of the experience/memory, I have to say that
“Damn this experience is actually f***ing awesome”
“Thank you Daniel Kahneman”
Totality
Now, my Mr. curiosity is really driving my whole brain controlling system. He decided to see if my utterly bad experience about the disagreements are bad from head to toe.
Life is scary sometimes.
I realized bad experiences can be a good one if I think positively. At first, I consider the disagreements we had a wasting time because we won’t see each other anymore. There will be no improvement of our relationship. So I feel bad that I made the wrong decisions to throw my curiosity to them and make them feel uncomfortable.
But as I think positively, try to find goodness from experience being labeled as bad. I realized that I was not doing anything bad, I was simply implementing my self-improving result. I disagreed with them not because I wanted to defend my ego, but because I was curious about why they think I was behaving impolitely and what’s so wrong about my behavior. Not for the sake of intentionally provocating human animal’s anger like I usually did before I start to nomad(I was a narcissist.)
I also found out that our conversations/disagreements was indeed unpleasant but quite meaningful. It allow me to see how I handle disagreements and how capable I am to be self-contained.
It was a sign of self-improvement that I didn’t flip out in disagreement as I usually do.
Wow seems the disagreements were nice, huh?
What can I change next?
Initially, I thought making biased decisions based on remembering self is not a big deal. I mean, I am still enjoying life most of the time. But there is a potential risk once my decisions are based on my unfair and dishonest evaluation.
Let’s say I never take a second time to revisit my 1st Ukrainian Couchsurfing experience and I don’t scrutinize my memory. I remain the same impression as I initially effortlessly automatically had — The experience was fucked up.
Sure I will still continue my life, my happy life. But subconsciously, I will avoid participating in potentially similar experience or certain type of human-animal because I fear something bad will happen again.
Yesterday, some human animals invited me to their friend’s house in a small city. I recall generating fear once I hear the invitation will take place in a small city. I decided to evaluate the meaningfulness and interestingness of this invitation. So I started to examine their English speaking capability to see how well they can communicate and how educated(in some way) they are. I was trying my best to differentiate the future experience from my previous bad experience. I was planning to identify the potential risk of getting a bad experience based on my previous bad memory. If my evaluation of this future event is almost identical to the previous bad experience/memory, then I will avoid it.
After 1 minute of contemplation(visualizing and matching this future event and past event). I refused the invitation.
But I was jealous after they came back and tell me “Naruto~ man they have 17 animals living at their house, the view was absolutely magnificent, and guess what we have an orgy!” (Jokinggg, there was no orgy(text me if you will be having)but they had a wonderful dancing party)
At first, I didn’t understand why their activity turns out to be so attractive to me, I mean, I’ve already deliberately evaluated their activity and scored 2 out of 10. It doesn’t make sense that their description of activity/invitation is 9 out of 10!
But I was wrong.
How can I forsee the whole dynamic of a future event?
How can I evaluate the entire future event if I have little information about it?
How I can make the inductive leap that this future event will be as identical as the previous bad experience? Based on their English speaking capacity? Based on the event located in a small city? What??? Seriously?
As soon as I made the decisions of preventing joining potentially similar bad experience based on my limited information. I indirectly judge the human animal, the whole city and their house. I tried to foresee the future by using my limited magnifier.
Little did I know the previous guest experience was not as bad as I think after I learned the concept of experiencing self and remembering self, in fact, the experience was pretty f***ing damng good.
Little did I know I was trying to make sense of the event/future/people by my willful ignorance.
And the result?
Yes, I did write a good article while this event was taking place that I was absent from. But as a human-animal like me who value new experience so much, I regretted that I didn’t join them. Regret, in a sense of, guilty that I underestimate the value of human animals/event.
Clearly, one philosophical question will arise as I both value hard-work/self-improvement/profession and new experience. When should I do what? When should I create a new experience for myself if I can create it every single day as I am nomading? And when should I refuse to create new experience and work on my articles?
I have not yet know the answer.(text me if you know)
But now I’ve learned that I cannot make big decisions effortlessly, otherwise I would ended up making decisions based on my biased potentially negative interpretation of my previous “bad” event.
I’ve learned that I want to be a stickler for allowing my remember-self contains both bad and good.
I’ve learned that life is so unpredictable, if I value new experience, then I should not easily refuse invitations unless it will hinder my health.
202012 Naruto(Eric) Kiev
