Whats your story morning glory?

Question: You get to choose a vacation anywhere, wherever in the world you would like to go and doing whatever floats your boat. Got it?  OK, now you are told that at the end of it, all of your photos will be destroyed and your memory of it wiped. What? Now think about this, would you choose the same vacation?
Take a millisecond to ponder that one.

If you would choose a different vacation or wonder what would be the point of going at all then you have some reconciling to do between yourselves. That's right, the both of you. This is what is currently blowing my mind.

You see your holidaying self is the 'experiencing self'.  The part of you doing it all right now... and now... and... ok the one living your life in the moment. This one will notice if the holiday is one week or two because it is right there lapping up the margaritas and getting a tan. The one that chooses the holiday to go on as well as most of your rational decisions is the other one- the "remembering" self. This one is constructing the narrative of your life through storytelling, and is apparently remarkably indifferent to the feelings of the experiencing self. Hence the extreme hiking holiday that will be a "growth experience" later, when you fondly look back on it.

The idea comes from Daniel Kahneman. The only psychologist ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics and is known for his studies of the psychology of judgment and decision-making.

Thanks to DK we know if someone asks if you are happy, one self can tell you if you are happy in your life and the other will tell you if you are happy about your life and they aren't highly correlated. Seriously, what are we like?

I know that when I am having an experience I am already re-presenting it to myself in words. I am trying to pin it down before it squirms away into the vagaries of memory. I look for good words, beautiful words, words with specificity that distinguish this experience from similar ones or group them together. Rich words. Visceral words. Fuck it, a haiku if necessary. It is very hard to accurately recall a feeling later.

I am constructing the story as the story is unfolding as if being close to the source will somehow leave less room for the corrupting influence of time. My experiencing self wants to shake me and say "Be here now. Be a witness. Don't judge... perceive". But I know that we are our remembering selves and all we get out of living this life is the memory of living it.  Even that is temporary so, goddamit, I will try and etch all of this in my neural pathways with words. Oh and the odd photograph.