and how to re-think our internal dialogue
A photo I took kayaking into the sunset, next to Railay Beach, Thailand
I was recently listening to a podcast with Sam Harris, a renowned meditation enthusiast and spiritual leader whose ideas appeal to logic-heads as much as the spiritual crowd — and something he said really struck a cord. He talked about how our sense of self is divided into two main parts: our remembering self and our experiencing self (this theory was proposed by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Winner and best-selling author of Thinking Fast and Slow).
Remembering self
Our remembering self carries our ego. Our remembering self is the one who speaks when someone asks:
Are you satisfied with your life right now?
It’s the one who reflects on if we’re ‘doing well’. It’s the one who criticises us for falling out of alignment or being ‘too connected to the present’, causing us to forget that we are trying to improve ourselves, work towards something, find meaning, purpose, etc. Our remembering self is like our internal Type A sergeant who tries to keep us on track.
Classic set-up for my remembering self to have a field day.
Experiencing self
Conversely, our experiencing self only knows the present. Our experiencing self causes us to forget where we are and lose our sense of self when we get captivated by a mesmerising experience like looking into a beautiful sunset or eating a delicious meal. It’s our experiencing self that allows us to fall so deep into a conversation that we light up and everything comes out effortlessly, all prompted by the experience we are in. Our experiencing self is like an elderly grandmother reminding us to enjoy life and treat ourselves to delicious things as they come up in the moment like cookies, beautiful scenery, chats with strangers and dinners with friends.
Eating mango sticky rice in Thailand — experiencing self is thriving.
The conflict
These two versions of ourselves are constantly in conflict with each other. The remembering self criticises us when we get too caught up in an experience unrelated to what we “should” be doing, while our experiencing self tries to pull us away from a task to participate in these types of spontaneous experiences. It’s a constant battle!
A desire to find meaning is a distinct characteristic of the remembering self, which, according to Sam Harris, causes us to be pulled away from the present moment and begin getting stressed over questions like what am I doing with my life? In these moments of existential angst (or simply feeling overwhelmed by what’s ahead), we allow our remembering self to take over our internal dialogue, putting a fog over the rest of the day and clouding everything with a residual sense of guilt that we aren’t “doing more” or working harder.
This pattern of going from intense enjoyment to a bout of self-judgement is not so unfamiliar to many of us. In fact, this theory of distinguishing the remembering self from the experiencing self explains so much of what has characterised my university experience, and what I imagine other ambitious, goal-oriented people might experience as well. The feeling of needing to excel, achieve, have it all ‘figured out’ at a young age in many ways has been a blessing! This mindset is what pushes me to think critically about what I’m doing, who I’m becoming, and how I can grow. But, of course, it can weigh pretty heavy on the shoulders of a 5”2 (read: 5”1), 21 year old girl to constantly be thinking about the existential meaning of life and what I’m meant to do!
I bet you’re thinking:
Jeez, chill out, you don’t need to have everything figure out yet. Go experience life! You’re so young… Slow down.
Well, guess who seems to share that sentiment? My experiencing self! That’s the part of me which feels so in love with the idea of taking every opportunity as it comes and being fully present and open to life.
The cycle
And so the cycle begins: the pursuit of connection and experience through means not necessarily aligned with our “goals.” Experiences like nights out in university, taking a morning to relax in bed, getting coffees with people we’ve missed, investing in relationships, movies, concerts, entertainment, or other sources of in-the-moment joy.
Experiences that speak most deeply to the experiencing self tend to be criticised by the remembering self.
These experiences are often guided by a loss of our sense of self, by being so immersed in an experience or a connection that everything else (including time and our ego) fades away and a feeling of euphoria sets in from being so distracted from the internal pressure we put on ourselves.
Warning: one can easily lose their sense of self by staring into dreamy sunsets framed by endless miles of tropical rainforest. Ninh Binh, Vietnam.
However, once these experiences fade away, an opening is created for the remembering self to re-emerge and create rules, goals and mandates to prevent us from getting so caught up in experiences, which appear to be distractions from where we want to go in life.
So, we make rules and routines to keep us on track — and they work, until the experiencing self gets so lost in an experience that a rule/goal/habit inevitably gets broken again. This could be an amazing chat with a friend which ends up going until 4 AM — messing up our sleep schedule for the rest of the week, or an impulsive slice of pizza after a night out — breaking a rule of no late night food during the week. Whatever the experience which gets us “off track” is, it’s often something we cherish in the moment, but may feel twinges of regret later on for — thanks to our remembering self. We then try to get back on track again by creating more rules and routines, until we break them again, and the cycle continues.
The constant dichotomy between these two, conflicting advocates for our happiness is something many of us deal with — the balance between taking advantage of opportunities in the moment, with the desire to maintain the discipline and focus required to achieve goals. It’s quite exhausting to always be going back and forth, especially when our remembering self views every deviation from our “plan” as proof that we can’t follow through on our commitments or reach our goals, ultimately resulting in a loss of self-confidence.
The dichotomy between these two selves got me thinking about how I’ve been framing this whole rift in my mind: I tend to criticise myself for being too focused and missing out on life and also criticising myself for being too open and having no sense of self — a lose-lose view. But this is not how we should be perceiving this back-and-forth internal dynamic.
The switching between deep focus and deep connection is part of the human experience.
Since it is likely that many of you reading this are, like me, at a young age, we are still in the process of obtaining more experiences and learning what we like and don’t like — all contributing to us building a stronger sense of self! We don’t have it all figured out yet. And that is OK! We’re just prototyping and iterating and closing the gap between what we want to be doing and what we are doing with each experience and decision. Each new opportunity or big decision hopefully ends up pointing us more in line with the direction of our internal compass.
But with this rapidly developing sense of self, comes bumps! hiccups! changes in plans! And that is also OK. It is OK to change your mind, to feel like something isn’t working, to want to try something else. It’s OK to sometimes just let go and allow our experiencing self fill us up with a sense of connection to the people and environment around us — in fact, it’s healthy! It’s part of life to experience things deeply, to adventure and to immerse ourselves in what is around us.
Optimizing for regret
A palliative nurse was quoted saying that most people’s biggest regret on their deathbed was that they worked too hard and didn’t spend enough time on important relationships. It is also a symptom of still being young and malleable to go too far on either side of the spectrum (working hard or embracing new experiences) — that’s how we find our limits and learn what feels best for us.
The top five regrets of the dying: 1. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
— Top Five Regrets of the Dying, The Guardian
6. I wish I had more nachos. (inferring based on my own life experience)
Win or Learn
While it’s great to be reflecting on our experiences, noticing patterns in what lights us up, and if the direction we’re going in is really one we’re excited about— we still need to find a balance between always improving, and just living life without overthinking everything. None of us want to be a rigid control freak who cannot do anything they didn’t plan for three weeks in advance, and yet we also don’t want to be that person with no sense of direction, wandering into whichever experience seems to fall into their lap that day. We want a balance.
The trick to finding the balance lies in preventing our remembering selves, or our ego, from dictating our choices as good or bad, failures or accomplishments, positive or negative — and instead shifting our focus to adopting the mindset that we either win or learn. Viewing our past as a means to make better choices in the present is a mindset more productive for both our experiencing selves and remembering selves by freeing us from the internal criticism which often weighs down our psyche.
Meditation
Sam Harris prescribes meditation to help separate our experiences from our sense of self. Meditation helps you see that an experience, decision, feeling, or thought isn’t who you are. Mindfulness allows us to detach our sense of self from the experience we are in.
Remembering that we are not our thoughts when negativity creeps in helps us shrink the amount of time we allow our inner critic to monopolize our internal dialogue, and helps us stop judging ourselves so harshly.
Meditation is sort of like eating vegetables — sometimes you don’t feel like doing it, but you do it because know it’s good for you (although if you really feel this way about vegetables, you must let me make you a veggie stir fry).
Finding your balance
We are all allowed to write a night off and enjoy an experience with friends. Equally, we are allowed to turn down that experience and decide to work on our goals, a side hustle, study, or even just indulge in some good old alone time. Our experiencing self and remembering self both want what is best for us — they simply have different agendas and definitions of what is best for us.
So, while goals, intentionality and seeking meaning is important, it’s just as necessary to take the occasional deep dive into the unplanned, spontaneous experience. Oftentimes, these experiences teach us something about ourselves which we could never have discovered in a library or inside our own head. To find the beautiful, fulfilling balance between these two selves, we need to separate our experience from our self image and embrace both in-the-moment and purposeful experiences as valuable parts of our journey, whatever lessons they may yield.
The take-away
Be intentional, but don’t let life slide by without seizing the opportunities right in front of you. We thrive off of connection, relationships and experiences. We need the balance. And to achieve it, we need to stop judging ourselves so damn harshly.