And to be brutally honest, this blog has been a spectacular fail job.
At the time that the idea of this blog was hatched, I was an unemployed first year student in Psychology. Time was a non-issue. Excitement borne from a new career path was certainly high. And well, there were quite fewer hobbies that required my time and efforts.
But now everything has changed. Let me just give you a quick snapshot...
I got a temporary job.
Then I got my old job back.
Then my old job became an ever increasing mountain of tasks, projects and responsibilities.
I split with my partner.
Took three profound holidays.
Found a new university to continue my education part-time.
Found a new batch of hobbies to start and never finish.
And among all these experiences, it seems I have lost some zeal for the one thing in life I have always wanted to do - to discover what makes humans special.
The past 2 years have given me some extremely wonderful experiences and yet just as many bad memories. But perhaps the worse of it is the disconnect I have felt with human beings.
So now I am back to this blog in the hope of rekindling my connection (or at least finding my love for the study of humans again).
The first iteration of my blog was doomed to fail not because of time constraints, but because I had gone about it the wrong way. Blogging should not just be about journal articles and new scientific discoveries. There should be a part of the blog that is me.
And so I hope to bring to you, the new Life Psycals 2.0. A desire to use psychology to explain me! And my one aspiration is that through me, perhaps you can learn something about yourself. That through my journeys, you can find a connection with another human (me?).
So now that the winded explanation is over, I wanted to give you (yet) another TED Talk.
Daniel Kahneman - The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory
(As an aside can I just say how much I love Professor
Kahneman. I have read his book and watched a few different
clips of him talking and to me, he is perhaps the smartest
psychologist alive.)
This talk has resounded with me incredibly in the past and in the present goes a long way to explain the recent unhappiness that has crept into my life.
Professor Daniel Kahneman (herein known as DK) discusses a recently understood paradox of happiness. Where economists and social scientist had once measured happiness by income, living conditions, social networks, heck even the number of times you have sex, new research has found that there is really two sides to happiness. DK describes this as the 'experiential self' and the 'remembering self'. In his words they are "being happy in your life and being happy about your life."
Being happy in your life is thus then living in the moment and the emotions that go with it. Being happy about your life is a matter of stories and memories. And a very important part of stories is how it ends. Critically, it is this 'remembering self', with all its memories of good and bad events in your life, which makes the decisions of your future.
Looking back on my own memories, it is perhaps this precise reason that the decisions made have shaped an unconscious unhappy existence. Armed with this knowledge, I will pursue the goal of reconnecting with my fascination for humans based on the moments rather than the bad memories.
Or I could just decide to move to Denmark and marry a gorgeous blond Danish woman?
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