Memory or: How your life sucks and you don't know it.

Here’s an interesting paradox: when I re-watch a movie like ‘’2001: A Space Oddysey’’ or play a game like Yume Nikki, I sometimes find that the things I like are few and far between, and there is much more boring, mind-numbing tedium. But a few days later, I once again remember it as a good experience.

It’s like how you see a trailer for an awesome-looking movie, and then find out that all the awesome moments were shown in the three minute trailer. A lot of times the mind works like a greatest hits reel. You’ll remember a good time ‘’after’’ the hike, and ‘’look forward’’ to hiking, but ‘’during’’ it, you’re mostly going to be complaining about mosquitoes and how much your feet hurt.

And it’s like that with a lot of things. I tend to hear parenting described as a wonderful transcendent joy, but it appears to mostly be composed of thankless drudgery like cleaning up dirty laundry, waking up all through the night to get a crying baby back to sleep, and getting yelled at by the Emo Teen your sweet little boy/girl has become. Stuff like your career and your own childhood seem to work similarly. What does this mean? Do a lot of bad moments somehow add up to a good time? Are the good moments so good that they eliminate the bad, or shine brighter ‘’because’’ of it? Or is it just selective memory, desperately trying to convince us that life isn’t a piece of shit?

The human memory usually remembers extremes. Most of what you were reffering to as 'bad' experiences were simply boring experiences. Boring experiences are not worth remembering.

Let's put it this way: Would you prefer to remember all that shit just as intensely as the good parts?

Another issue is that when you experience something for the first time, your brain tends to be more engaged by newer stimulus, effectively lengthening the experience and dragging out your perception of time. Experiments have even shown that when adrenaline is flowing and you're really excited, your brain tends to be more perceptive of each passing second. The effect even tends to work on young people in general, whose brains work a little bit faster than older individuals.

Ultimately, you are not actually a single 'individual,' but instead more of a collection of processes slowly assembling its own belief in an identity. Everything from skewed memories to false memories mean that at any given moment, you are not exactly the same person or even believe the same things about yourself that were present moments ago. Having different thought processes active in any given situation means that your own personal reactions and principles will have variations from one moment to another.

Character is in essence a description less of solid ideals held within you and more a description of the mess of methodology that pops up most often in your head.

It's usually not something to make too big of a deal about. Just accept that most of the perceptions we have of ourselves are usually instinctual or culturally developed falsehoods, and try to determine for yourself what is true of yourself at any given moment. It will save you a lot of mindfuck over the years.

This is less about who I am and more about what my life is.

Life is boring and shitty. You spend most of it sleeping, eating, doing laundry, doing paperwork, and other boring shit you'd rather not remember. I firmly believe that dreams are your brain's way of giving you something entertaining to remember instead of the backs of your eyelids for eight hours >.>

Having a fertile imagination is good for staving that off:

I'll drive to work, and yeah, the drive itself is tedious and boring, but I'm in la-la land, working out how awesome it would be if I slapped a turbocharger onto the engine, working out all the technical issues and problems in my head (where would I tap off for my turbocharger oil supply? Ball-bearing or solid journal turbo? Water-cooled turbo? How much boost could the bottom end handle before I need a shovel to scoop up the crankshaft bits after it blows out through the oil pan? Change the camshaft or leave it as is? Rear-mount turbo, or in the engine bay? Can I get away with using the stock fuel injectors, or do I bump up to higher flow rates? And on and on and on) turning over the problem over and over, until thirty minutes later, I show up at work. I park my car and can honestly say that I had a fantastic drive to work.

^ Dreams rock, too.

edited 22nd Sep '10 2:31:01 PM by pvtnum11

pvtnum,

I'm actually similar, but please let me say (if only from personal experience ) that I'd hate to be the car in the lane next to yours.

Eh, I'm able to multi-task. Plus my commute is BOOORING. If it get's busy, then I can kiss my imagination out the door and I'm focused on not getting hit by some idiot who cuts me off, or why some moron is tail-gating within a few feet of my bumper.

Have you ever read Stumbling On Happiness? It's a book that talks a lot about the sort of things you described.

^^^^ @Pvtnum: good post.

There are usually boring or irritating bits to everything, but we remember particularly positive or negative experiences more than dull or mediocre experiences. Nothing remotely happens when you are bored. It is just meh, and uneventful or repetitive experiences simply become a footnote.

Most boring experiences are lower priority than more significant ones, we will cease to care that something was boring because of our more interesting or traumatic memories. Boring is just boring, it happens to everyone. It doesn't make your life suck... but if all your memories are purely boring, then of course I can see the point.

edited 22nd Sep '10 6:56:46 PM by Shichibukai

Reality is shaped by perception. It doesn't matter what an objective assessment of our experience is like; there is no such a thing as an objective assessment of experience.

See, I read this comic that I really should have saved where a man - going home from his office job - starts paddling in the rain like a child, eventually spilling his documents. When he gets home he talks to his goldfish about how he lost his ability to dream, his lack of fulfillment in his office job, and how he wanted to be an explorer.

After dinner, the man falls asleep and dreams that he is in his goldfish's tank, and observes that while a fish-tank seems small to us, to fish it is their entire world and is full of magic and wonder. But after playing for a moment, he spots his fish staring through the glass, on the man's own sleeping form. He observes that even a world of nothing but water and sand has its own constraints and limitations.

The next morning, the man quits his job and takes a new one as a garbage collector, being much happier with his life now that he finally has a chance to be a treasure-hunter and explorer of sorts.

Too Long, Didn't Read version: It doesn't really matter if your life sucks or not as much as what you perceive it as.

Now people in denial, that's a different matter, because they know that something is wrong but refuse to look the problem in the eye.

edited 23rd Sep '10 1:24:10 AM by krrackknut

The problem is that I'm going to percieve somethings as good afterwards but not very much during.

I think Your Mileage May Vary on just about everything mentioned in the Op. I’ve do get board of movies if I watch them too often, and occasionally ratchet down my appreciation for a movie after a rewatch. Often times a rewatch just confirms for me that the movie is simply awesome.

My career has been pretty good and a fairly constant movement towards making more and more money.

I think in some ways you’re right, that multiple “bad times” may equal one “good time” or for many people the quality of the good outweighs the quantity of bad. Maybe some people selectively remember the “good” while pushing back the bad, but personally, I’d say I’m in a fairly constant good mood. Though, I think a great deal of that is my cultivating a surrounding for me where (At home and at work) I feel I’m quite accomplished in life.

If it help don’t think of those moments of happiness as small bits of light in an otherwise dark world, think of them as your moments of victory over all the crap life throws at you where you make life bend over and make it your bitch.

edited 25th Sep '10 10:34:55 AM by Justice4243

I'm the opposite— (supposedly) positive experiences, negative or emotionally flat memories.

I find that every so often, it's a good idea to test the preconceived notions that you have without specific memories of why. Like, every so often, I'll see a piece of celery on a tray and, since it's rare that I ever eat celery, I don't remember exactly what it tastes like and try it.

"Oh yeah, that's why I hate celery! Gagh! Blargh!"

It's like touching the big shiny red button that you forgot why everyone was telling you not to touch it.

edited 26th Sep '10 4:47:27 PM by Clevomon

I’m the same way, but even with things I like I don’t tend to discover I dislike them now and that me deciding I had liked them was somehow in error..

I did discover that Army Of Darkness is not nearly as entertaining to me now as before, but this hasn’t followed with very many other movies I remember enjoying as a young lad.

I feel it's most often a result of the strongest feelings you felt during the experience.

We had this event after I finished my last deployment called a "reintegration event" which I found absolute tedium during the course of it, because it was just 8 hours of death by powerpoint.

But unless I think very specifically about that part, I overall say that I had an absolute blast because they put us up in a kickass hotel on the beach for a weekend and I got crazy drunk downtown with a bunch of my battle buddies, and then we all passed out in the hotel lobby and woke up 5 minutes before day 2 of the event, talking at our table the whole time about how awesome last night was and not really paying any attention to the presentation because we were too hungover to care.

When we're experiencing the tedium, we hope that it's going to lead toward a great payoff. Even before we experience them, we're thinking about the good parts, from a certain point of view. So obviously, we're going to enjoy the experience as a whole.

Relevant - http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2020#comic

This is true, but if it wasn't then you wouldn't be able to spend eight or more hours sitting at a job and waiting in a queue and doing housework each and every day. You'd be some sort of hedonist who chases after exciting experiences and never does anything productive.

Cheer up! Boring is not bad! And if you have exciting parts from it to remember, you've got the best of both worlds!

edited 5th Oct '10 9:49:22 AM by Vree