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byrnema comments on TED Talks: Daniel Kahneman - Less Wrong
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I thought this was interesting. (I watched the whole thing and didn't want my 20 minutes back.)
However, one premise confused me. He referred to the 'tyranny of the remembering self' and suggested that there could be more balance. But I'm not sure why we should care about the experiencing self at all.
As I child, I experimented with abnegating the experiencing self, and found that it was a pretty straight-forward route to success and well-being. Maybe I was wrong, but I thought this.
Why should we value the memory of experiences? For me, it's simply because I enjoy them. It gives me momentary pleasure to think back on good times. But it also gives me momentary pleasure to eat ice cream. The tyranny Kahneman refers to is our bias towards optimizing an experience for the memories it will give versus optimizing an experience for the momentary pleasure of the experience itself. If memories give relatively little total future pleasure in comparison to the momentary experience itself then I think we are mistaken to optimize in this fashion.