Gifts for the present

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself in the present moment is your complete and immediate focus.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Focus is what allows you to get things done. A paranoid obsession with the future is the parasite of your joy. It's easy to over-optimise for our remembering selves and create memory structures that rely on competitive cognitive artefacts.

That's a pretty loaded sentence. I'll explain. In behavioural psychology, per Daniel Kahneman, we have two selves: the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self only exists in the present moment. The remembering self tells stories of the past. Often we make plans in anticipation of our remembering self, opting for activities that will be memorable. There is nothing wrong with this. The quandary is when our experiencing self and remembering self are misaligned or sub-optimised.

One example of possible misalignment is the peak-end effect. Due to memory bias and recency bias, we are most likely to recall the most intense moment of stimuli during an event, and the final moment. These two points form a snapshot that characterises our recollection of the experience. In the context of Kahneman's study, colonoscopy patients were more likely to retrospectively ignore the discomfort of a rod up their bum for an extra minute, because their remembering self superseded the experiencing self.