The Delusional Podcast with Kevin Blake Ferguson

Season Finale: Control

One of the occupational hazards of presenting illusions and telling stories on stage is that I sometimes people believe them. Most of the time, it's a fan after a show who thinks I have something supernatural in common with the psychic they go to, or a corporate executive who half-jokes about training the sales team. When this happens, I do my best to clarify that I am an illusionist, and that the illusions they have seen are just that: illusions. But every now and then I will get contacted by someone who won't believe that the illusions are illusions, or that I am anything other than a real wizard, and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. Every so often these true believers will ask me to use my powers for their purposes. I always say no. Except once, 5 years ago, in the curious case of Red, a man who contacted me to cast a spell to save his marriage. It all started one cold, foggy summer morning when I woke up to my phone vibrating on my bedside table. This was a common enough occurrence, as I was in the optimistic habit of setting my alarm for 6:00am, hoping that I would miraculously awaken with the vigor and strength of a 50-year-old triathlete but invariably reacting to the bedside table buzz more with the groggy, weak-eyed confusion of a teenager late to school than any kind of breakfast-making master of the morning. This morning, however, the buzz was not an alarm, but a missed call from a 408 area code. 'Spammer,' I thought, rolling over and falling back to sleep. The image of a room full of off-shore talent calling everyone in California to sell timeshares on the moon drifted dreamily through my head. An hour or so later, with the sun a bit higher in the sky and the morning fog having receded a bit more from the horizon and also my brain, I checked my phone and saw three more missed calls and a series of text messages from a man named Red. He told me that his wife was leaving him, and wanted me to do "black magic" to prevent that from happening. We all look for ways to control the uncontrollable. How do I get girls to like me? What can I say in an argument to make things better? How can I convince my boss to give me a raise, or my coworker to stop pushing their priorities onto me? I felt for Red. I had been through breakups before. I remembered that insatiable longing for the old time, for happiness, and the need fight against the hard, unbreakable framework of destiny. I remembered the overwhelming sense that there must be something I could do to fix it all, that I wouldn’t hesitate to shoulder the burden of gods to re-weave the vast assurance of consequence into the good, gray blanket of a new fate beneath which I could sleep soundly, instead of the somnambulant torture of the hard tile of the bathroom floor. I remembered the nutty stuff I did when I thought I was going to lose someone I loved. Was texting a magician to see if he could cast a spell to save his relationship any crazier than any of the stuff I did? Well, yes, it was, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I would save Red. It was an imperative of the heart, and also, it seemed like it would liven up my morning. I hatched a plan. I told Red that there was something I could do, but I’d need his help. Attraction enchantments were spells that happened in three parts, you see. One on the side of the spell-caster (me), and two on the side of the spell receiver (Red), and three on the side of the enchanted (that would be Kate, his wife). I gave Red a list of instructions over the following days. First he was to write in black ink, ideally with a fountain pen, but ballpoint will work (a pencil will not, because it needs to be permanent) an exhaustive list of every reason why he thinks she wants to leave him. Be honest, I said, otherwise it won’t have any chance of working. He was to do this in secret and make sure she didn’t see the list. It was important he not do this in their bedroom, or in any room in which she had belongings. Best to do it at a cafe or bar. Second, he was to overlay a second piece of paper on top of the first, and write a second list, this time a list of things he had learned over the course of their relationship. How he's grown for the better, and for the worse. I had him fold these two pieces of paper together into a square and place them underneath a small stone bowl under their bed. Inside the bowl he should place any small artifact of their relationship, and a lock of her hair taken from her hairbrush tied into a knot. It was important that they sleep in the bed together, I told him, without any anger. That part was up to him. On my end, I told him I would be staying up all night spell casting. So I needed some information. Things he admired about her, things that he admired about himself. The basics, where they’re from, what time they first met. Etc. Etc. Etc. I learned that Red had met his wife Kate when they were both 18, and after years of ups and downs, they were married. She was a fashion student, from out of town, and with all the action of the big city of San Jose to compete against, Red had to work hard for her love. He told me stories of Kate and him treasure hunting in record stores and arcades and of nights spent in bed together in a small apartment on the other side of the wall of a Chinatown karaoke bar where they fell asleep every night to the deep thrum of friends drinking and screaming sad karaoke ballads into the wee hours of the night. They were the happiest days of his life, he said. Now, three years after their wedding, they seemed to have lost that loving feeling. She had stopped being intimate with him, and preferred to spend her nights watching TV silently. Red told me that she claimed she was unhappy, but she did not want to talk about their marriage or try to work on it. She had become increasingly introverted, and any request to have a conversation would turn into a shouting match. He thought that she was having an affair, or—truth was, he had no idea. Things had changed. She had changed, but so had he. They fought a lot over the smallest things, and infractions such as a dish in the sink would cascade into a competition of relationship grievances. I learned all this through poorly spelt text messages as I laid in bed that morning. But it was time I got out of bed, so I said I would text him tomorrow, there was another piece of the spell he needed to do. The next day, I asked how it went. He said he did what I asked and it seemed to be working. The last step, I told him, was to unfold the two lists from underneath the bowl, and overlay a third piece of paper atop the first and second. On this third paper he was to write a letter to Kate honestly accepting her decision to leave him, if she decides to, at the same time as fully embracing his transgressions within their relationship, and forgiving her for his. I said that for the spell to work, he needed to really feel those feelings of compassion both for her and for him. After doing this, he needed to have her read the letter, and then report back how she received it. I said that how it went would determine what kind of spell I would cast the following night. I don’t know if Red ever did that, because the truth is I never heard from him again, and, assuming he had figured out my extremely transparent and pretty-messed-up-when-you-think-about-it ploy to interject myself into his breakup, I didn’t press the issue. We've all tried to fight whatever pull there is that drags us into the world of lack and longing, that feeling that there is some way of reaching out and pulling someone back once they slipped through the fingers. That feeling that makes you believe that there is some way of erasing the blackboard, and rewriting the distance between two people, no matter how far apart their points are in space. But the truth is, man is not a canvas upon which every experience leaves no mark; there is no way to erase a footprint once made, nor the space between two people who are afraid to touch. We are all wandering clouds at the mercy of every wind, of every gathering of air, of every combination of temperature and pressure; and while we are not merely the captives and helpless victims of our heredity; we are, in very large part, creatures of our own making. And there are some things that we just cannot control. Thanks for reading this week’s Delusion. Please consider subscribing if you’re not, or sharing with a friend. Agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delusional.substack.com [https://delusional.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 10. The Secrets of Luck

I. Superstition I use to have a lucky pair of swimming goggles. They were neon green, the color of speed, and when I looked through them I felt like I was seeing the world how plants see the world, all blinding greens and yellows. I remember when I would take them off everything would seem faded, like the summer sun had bleached out the true colors of the day. The goggles were lucky, which I knew because every time I would wear them at swim meets I would win my races. Of course, the truth was that I was 8 years old, and the real luck I had was (1) a natural gift for swimming and (2) a backyard pool and (3) minimal competition. But as a kid, it was the goggles, so I wore them every day at practice even though they made my nose bridge bleed. Luck is the most important determining factor in our lives. I’d rather be lucky than just about anything else. Chance contributes to who we date and marry, if we're athletic, attractive, charming, or intelligent. The luck of where we’re born and who our parents are determines our potential to experience healthy relationships and the quality of education, which (when combined with chance encounters and lucky breaks) lead to the careers, trajectories, hobbies we pursue, and who become our friends and neighbors. Whether we get eaten by a shark or win the lottery or grow up to be a magician or a glassblower or a management consultant is all the luck of the draw. Luck makes up the core of who we are and what we have in life. It’s everything, which is why we can't help but grasp for a way to control it. Can we? People have been trying to gain good luck and avoid bad luck for millennia. If you want good luck in 18th century Britain, shake a chimney sweep’s hand. In ancient Egypt, you might carry a hedgehog amulet on a string. In 700BCE China, consider acquiring a lucky cricket. But good luck is just the half of it. The fears of Protestant Christians about satanic rituals and witchcraft are why you should avoid black cats. And did you know that walking under ladders desecrates the symbol of the holy trinity? Never do that. Or break a mirror, lest the souls trapped within escape and torment you for the rest of your life. Quant and silly though these superstitions may be to us now, most of us can’t help but breathe a prayer when we see basketball or football mid-arc. And are you going to tell me that when it really matters you don’t knock on wood? I do. Much research has been done on the power of superstition and belief. Most of it has searched for a link between superstition and its impact on uncontrollable effects, such as if a good luck charm could impact one’s success on guessing whether a coin flips heads or tails. Of course, it doesn’t. But some has actually shown a moderate measurable effect for the power of luck. Lysann Damisch et al, 2010 [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44638847_Keep_Your_Fingers_Crossed] ran a now famous experiment that tasked subjects to attempt golf putts. Interestingly, they found that subjects who were told their golf ball had been a lucky ball so far scored more hole-in-one putts than a comparison group. Considering the experiment was done with only 28 subjects, I’m agnostic as to whether the experiment would replicate (surprise! I looked further into it and turns out it didn’t [https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/1864-9335/a000190]), but the reason this type of story is so compelling is that it seems obvious that luck, if you believe in it, seems like it would offer a shortcut to confidence, which has been linked with performance [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51843262_Confidence_Mediates_the_Sex_Difference_in_Mental_Rotation_Performance]. It’s a pretty common assumption that in the world of sports, conscious thinking can get in the way. “I was in my head” is something you’ll constantly get from athletes who flub a free throw, a golf swing, or a pitch. The rule is: don’t overthink it. Lucky charms and superstitious rituals may not connect with anything deeper than the ingrained neural pathways that can lead to a mindset of confidence, becoming a powerful placebo that allows elite athletes (and the rest of us) to perform without worrying about our performance, which could allow us to perform a bit better. II. Coincidence How do we know if a result is the effect of luck or skilled intention? Let’s talk about Nazis. The world’s first guided ballistic missile was developed by the German war machine in World War II and called the Vergeltungswaffe 2, or "Retribution Weapon 2". The V-2 was supersonic, meaning that it would hit with no audible warning, and carried a 1000kg warhead leaving craters “66 feet wide and 26 feet deep, ejecting approximately 3,000 tons of material into the air.” From September 1944 through March 1945, German forces launched over 3,000 V-2 missiles as a last ditch attempt to influence the war outcome. While the new weapon failed at changing the trajectory of the war, it was very successful in creating widespread terror and conspiracy in the target cities during the months of bombing. In London, for example, theories abound that the Nazis were targeting specific streets and locations with their missiles, and Londoners looking at maps of the bomb sites started seeing patterns. Areas that were spared by bombs were suspected to be strongholds of Nazi sympathizers, while people abandoned areas that had clusters of bombs, thinking that those neighborhoods were specific targets likely to be bombed again. All the worry was misguided, however, as the guidance systems of the missiles had a margin of error of a few miles, and if that wasn’t enough, statistical analysis of the bomb sites show that the distribution was as close to random as you’d expect. Turns out it was just dumb luck. It’s often difficult to determine if what we’re experiencing has deeper meaning, or is a random streak or cluster within a truly random sequence. Seeing signal within noise is in our nature, even if that signal is bogus. We tend to underestimate the amount of variability that naturally occurs within random sequences of events. Knowing that a coin toss is 50:50, if you get 9 heads in a row, it feels like the next flip can’t possibly be a heads again (the gambler’s fallacy), even though we’re told that the probability for the next flip remains at 50:50. But within every run of chance events, streaks happen naturally. This is a phenomenon known as the clustering illusion, and it does something to explain our superstitious nature. 10 heads in a row: 10 heads in a row with context: There are certain areas of life where signal vs noise is obvious, such as in learning how to swim or make pottery or HAM radio. But much of life is rife with randomness and chance. Is it really possible to continuously beat the market as a retail investor, or are those retail investors who do just statistical inevitabilities of a random distribution? And what about in life, careers, marriages, etc? We may not be able to harness luck to win in at games of true chance, but being that we are a point on the Poisson distribution ourselves, it is a statistical inevitability that we will find ourselves faced with opportunities that will pay off big time. This is the luck we can control. How can we tell what and when they are? III. The ‘secret’ of luck. If most of our lives are determined by a roll of the proverbial dice, and if we accept that lucky events or opportunities will exert a dramatic course shift in our lives, is there a real way to control luck? According to Richard Wiseman, yes. In his book The Luck Factor [https://www.amazon.com/The-Luck-Factor-Richard-Wiseman/dp/0786869143/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386984935&sr=8-1&keywords=the+luck+factor], Wiseman investigates how to increase the positive opportunities that arise naturally throughout our lives. His hypothesis is that true difference between self-proclaimed lucky people and unlucky people was openness to opportunity. So he found subjects who considered themselves to be lucky and unlucky, and ran experiments to look at how open they were to opportunities right in front of them. In one experiment, he asked his two groups to count how many pictures were in a newspaper as fast as possible. It took the unlucky group on average about 2 minutes, but the lucky group finished in just seconds. Can luck enhance performance that much? Not at all. The lucky group saw something the unlucky group missed: a blatant half-page ad on the second page that said “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” According to Wiseman, the people who consider themselves lucky tended to be people who rated higher on extraversion and openness to experience, which is perhaps unsurprising, but the good news is that he also found that for self-proclaimed lucky and unlucky people, extraverts or not, he found that it is possible to increase people’s perceived luck by training them in different four basic skills: * Creating and noticing chance opportunities * Listening to intuitions * Create self-fulfilling positive prophesies via positive expectations * Resilience in the face of bad luck that turns bad things into opportunities These simple ideas are not new ideas at all, but what Wiseman adds to the story of luck is evidence that we are not immutable and stuck with the luck we feel we have. It is possible, and fairly easy for most of us to change a few habits in order to maximize opportunities that could change our lives for the better. It won’t, of course, help you win at the blackjack tables or in games of dice, but for the places that it really matters; in our careers, friends, hobbies, and chance opportunities, playing the game right might make you extraordinarily lucky. With a little nudge, we can all feel like I feel. Extremely, extremely lucky. Why? You know it—I’ve still got those green goggles. Thanks for reading this week’s Delusion. Please consider subscribing if you’re not, or sharing with a friend. Agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delusional.substack.com [https://delusional.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 8. The King and the Cobblestones

A man in a kingdom walked to work every day. And every day he would admire the beauty around him. The flowers in the windows, the perfectly laid cobblestones on the street, and the handsome smiling people around him. On his walk he would look up at the castle. He couldn't help but admire it, too. And on the rare occasion when he saw the King himself in his gilded carriage pass in the streets on his monthly tour of the lower quarter, he couldn't help but admire his carriage, and his attendants. And what was he eating in there? The smell of delicious sweets was detectable even from where he stood. If only he could have a taste of those riches, what life would be! And so went the thoughts of the man as he went about his daily work and back to his home in the evening. And eventually he did become richer. He worked hard every day, and he was able to replace his grey tunic with a new one with bright colors. Soon he got tired of the color or cut, so bought another, and another. He didn't need a castle, but a house in the upper ring would be nice, even though it was a bit further from his friends and his favorite tavern. All the amenities he supposed were needed, so he bought tables and chairs and beds and dressers and wardrobes and carpets and wall hangings. He had what he wanted, and could finally relax. But as he lay in bed at night, with his eyes closed, he imagined the King, smoking a pipe and eating sweets as he sat in his gilded carriage. The man didn't need a gilded carriage, but he got a wooden one. He didn't need a private chef and a legion of servers, but it would be nice to not have to cook, so he got promoted, and began paying carriages and carts and men to bring him his food every evening, cooked from the finest chefs in the finest reviewed kitchens in the city. He wanted to live long and be healthy and attractive, so even though it was extremely expensive, he mostly ate kale salads & lamb. He had what he wanted, and could finally relax. But soon he felt a now familiar itch. He became tired of his wall hangings and furniture, and somehow his house had gotten smaller, having become filled with all the things he had purchased, and so he purchased a new one with a few more rooms. He didn't need an army of servants, but it would be nice, simpler even, if the finer things were taken care of. And so he hired a chef, and cleaners and maids. He no longer had to do anything at home, for the cook prepared all his meals and the servants had dusted the furniture and made his bed as he left for work. His new position was in a fine building nearer the castle, and on his ride, he rarely looked out to see the smiling people or the flowers in the windows. Instead, his eyes were glued to sheets of paper, and instead of appreciating their lay, he was annoyed at the cobblestones—they were so loud against the hoofs of his horse and the wheels of his carriage, and even though he was sat on two cushions, he was still jostled this way and that. One day a jostle seemed to be due to more than the drop of wooden wheel on uneven cobble, and so the man looked out the window, and saw that they had stopped. The King's carriage was passing. So he looked out his window and into the King's, and noticed that the King's tunic was no finer than his. It was the same cut even. He couldn't smell the King's sweets and pastries over the scent his, so much closer at hand. And up close he realized that the gild was really just paint on wood. Right as the carriage passed, the King met his eyes, but just for a moment, before returning to their previous position, glued as they were to the sheets of paper he was shuffling, as he jostled up and down, up and down. The feeling that we are running toward happiness when we chase material rewards past a certain point, is a delusion that we are all familiar with. There is a term for it: the hedonic treadmill. Coined in 1971 by psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, the term refers to the homeostatic tendency for people to settle toward a stable state of happiness after swings high or low. Brickman was the first author of perhaps the most thrilling study on happiness, Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?, 1978 [https://www.talenteck.com/academic/Brickman-Coates-Janoff-1978.pdf] which surveyed groups who exist at what most people would consider the opposite sides of the spectrum of fortune: lottery winners and accident victims, plus a control group, about how happy they are. According to modern interpretations, the study's design left something to be desired, but its result provided support for what became the "set-point" theory of happiness, which suggests that even after tragic events such as long term injury or divorce, or positive ones such as winning the lottery or promotion, everyone has a happiness level that he or she goes back to over time. Or in other words, money doesn't buy you happiness. There is a tragic aside in the story: apparently success doesn't provide it either; four years after publishing the research that made him famous, Brickman took to the roof of the tallest building in Ann Arbor, and jumped. New research on happiness complicates this simple idea, showing that there is some relationship between wealth and happiness up to a certain point, and that wealth contributes more to life satisfaction (i.e. the remembering self [https://delusional.substack.com/p/good-bad-times]) than moment-to-moment happiness, but the hedonic treadmill is still an extremely useful concept for considering our world and choices. The hedonic treadmill can be explained through habituation, a fancy word for 'getting used to something.' Repeated exposure to a stimulus lowers our response to it. This happens with everything; iPhones, cars, fine dining, people. We can also habituate to sounds, pain—heck, stare at a color long enough and your photoreceptors will habituate to it, lessening their response to it. This is where afterimages come from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkK3Z0i4mME]. The truth is, we can get used to just about anything. Discerning between those things that are constants in our lives that provide true happiness and contentment, and those things that are costly that are fleeting, should be our goal. Things like a good walk. A pretty view. Flowers in a window. Or finely laid cobblestones. The idea in this post is a common one, and one we are all well-familiar with. But it’s hard sometimes to remember simple truths. Whenever I find myself desiring something, or finding myself drawn to a shiny object, I remind myself of the story of the king and the cobblestones, and perhaps now so will you. Thanks for reading this week’s Delusion. Please consider subscribing if you’re not, or sharing with a friend. Agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delusional.substack.com [https://delusional.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 7. Cause and Effects

Any conjurer worth her cards knows that the hardest thing to fool an audience into believing is not that something happened, but rather that nothing happened at all. During the course of any illusion, the secret actions that make a trick trick must be either hidden completely, or masked as something else. Doing this in a convincing way is the grand challenge of the prestidigitator. We must obfuscate the cause in order for there to be an effect. In the realm of magic (and it is a realm, let there be no mistake), an 'effect' is the name for what the audience experiences. It can also be the name for a plot (e.g. "I love card-to-wallet effects") or the name of a trick itself (e.g "Triumph is one of the most beautiful effects"). In books on legerdemain students find tricks described twice: first 'the effect' and then 'the explanation.' Why am I explaining the finer trifles of magical taxonomy? To point out that in the art and experience of magic, there are no causes, only explanations. This absence of causes with the existence of effects within the art of magic can be a source of inner moral struggle for modern magicians, who are less interested in moonlighting as a real mystic or presenting "mysteries from the Orient." The problem is one of belief and honesty: what do we, as magicians, expect our audiences to believe is the cause for our effects? What do we want them to believe? When we provide no cause, magicians worry that there is an implied one—that the magician is a god-like figure who can snap her fingers and make the impossible possible. To escape this, which feels to many like a drama-less experience of magic, some performers today employ a fake cause, known as a fake process or a 'faux-cess', in order to make their magic more 'believable'. The irony of 'believable magic' is lost on these entertainers, and the deception is double because they do a disservice to their audience, impressing them with something they might actually now believe is real, when it’s not. I tend to think that these worries are exaggerated, and that 99% of people who see magicians do understand the simple contract that they've signed on entering the theater—that they are here to be deceived, to enjoy seeing things they can't explain, and to try to figure out that absent cause. Because in magic, the cause is actively searched for. For all the unnecessary fears of magicians, people very rarely attribute actual powers to the magician instead of the much more reasonable explanation—that they are watching magic show. But in life, which is arguably more explainable than a magic show, we make this error of attribution all the time. When we look out at the world, and specifically the people who occupy it, how do we judge the causes for effects we see? Unlike in a magic show, where we assume that effects are caused by the situation of being in a magic show, not the magician having powers, outside the theater we tend to assume that the causes for the behaviors we see in others are dispositional in nature, rather than situational. The textbook example of this tendency, known as the fundamental attribution error, is of being cut off in traffic—do we assume the other person is a jerk, or do we assume that they are in a hurry that is justified by some reasonable circumstance, such as being late to a meeting or rushing to the hospital? Research and my memories suggest that we tend to think the former. The assumptions that we form about strangers form the basis for our disposition toward humanity. If we attribute character flaws to what can be explained by situational factors and external incentives, we will be like the magician who believes his illusions are real, and accordingly who will be fooled by the world. However, if we understand that the behavior of others is rooted in the context of their environments and our perceptions of our situations are to some extent illusions, then we will be able to better appreciate the person and the human condition in all of its complexities. Magic is an art form built on a shaky foundation, which is, I think, a part of the reason it's so fun to watch. There is a precariousness in its appearance. An audience knows that there is a secret, and they know that it's just beyond their field vision, and the moment they glimpse it, they know that the magic will pop out of existence, that gap where it existed instantly filling with an explanation which destroys it. But the promise of magic is that such an explanation always remains hidden. With a little sleight-of-hand, the magician’s greatest trick may be to nudge the audience to appreciate the inherent mystery that is in their own world as well as the magician's, and crucially, to appreciate their own knowledge and its limitations—their inability to perceive all the causes for an effect. We all have a skewed view of ourselves and others, but the perspective can be a healthy one, reminding us of our inherent strangeness, aliveness, difference, and potential. Thanks for reading this week’s Delusion. Please consider subscribing if you’re not, or sharing with a friend. Agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delusional.substack.com [https://delusional.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 6. Good Bad Times

When I reminisce about my life, there are a lot of extremely unpleasant experiences that I look back fondly on. Getting stabbed in the hand. Bad relationships. Swim practice. As much as I know that these episodes were filled with sleep deprivation, light-to-substantial physical and mental torture, anxiety and aimlessness, the phrase 'good times' nonetheless finds its way to my lips, arising from some other place inside me that is not bound by skin and bones. My former 'career' as a swimmer is a perfect example of this phenomenon. If you had asked me to rate my happiness 1-10 during any of the thousand 5am wake-ups, numbingly cold ocean swims or practices I went through from ages 13-22, the average rating would, to an anthropologist, show a creature whose great achievement in this finite life was the continuous pursuit of pain and tedium, while staring at the black line at the bottom of a pool. And yet, looking back, good times. How do we measure a life? Would you prefer to have a life filled with achievement, even if you were unhappy while grinding away every day? Or would you prefer to have a happier day-to-day, even if that life didn't amount to much? Is there a way to have both? The fact that many experiences can be unhappy ones in the moment, and yet add meaning and richness to our lives, is an important consideration for choosing how we spend our time. Daniel Kahneman discusses this conflict as a conflict between two types of selves: the 'remembering self' and the 'experiencing self.' The experiencing self is the self that lives within moment-to-moment window of attention. It's the self that answers when you are asked 'how do you feel right now?' The 'remembering self,' on the other hand, is the self that considers how things went and creates a story about the experience. According to Kahneman, these two selves have very different ideas about life, which are each subject to their own biases and errors. The remembering self, for example, seems to have a bias for good endings. Redelmeier and Kahneman, 1996 [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8857625/] looked into the difference between how a painful medical procedure was rated during and after the procedure. Surprisingly, a procedure that was shorter, but ended right after the highest moment of pain, was remembered as much worse than a procedure that was longer, with the intensity of the pain ending much lower. Even though the overall net amount of pain is greater, this result suggests that for painful procedures it might be wise to extend the length of a procedure so that it could end on period of lower pain. Another study found that the overall positive experience of a symphony was remembered as much less positive when it ended on a literal sour note. A bad ending can ruin a positive experience, just like a better ending can soften a terrible one. This bias of the remembering self is known as the peak-end rule. According to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule]: The peak–end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. In other words, people seem to weigh episodes of an experience according to not only how they felt during each moment but also how they felt when the experience was nearing its end. In our lives there seems to be a bias toward our remembering selves, likely due to the fact that our memories are all we get to keep. What more are we, than our memories of our experiences? The peak–end rule has important consequences for how we evaluate the quality of their lives, and how we decide to live them. Should we go for what’s easy and comfortable, or try for the difficult and challenging? Maybe the answer is yes, but only if it ends well. Perhaps the reason I fondly remember my career as a swimmer is because it ended on the highest of notes, with the peak achievement I had been chasing for years and years. If it had ended with a failure, like it did for many friends of mine, perhaps I would think it was all a waste of time. But as it is, I’m lucky. It was good times. Thanks for reading this week’s Delusion. Please consider subscribing if you’re not, or sharing with a friend. Agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit delusional.substack.com [https://delusional.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]