Why We Go Through the World with a False Self-Image
What do you know about the First World War? Correct: in 1914 a Serbian freedom fighter shot the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, whereupon Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Because nearly all the European states were bound by treaties, within a few days they’d all been dragged into the war. None of the allied blocs were dominant, so the front soon froze solid. It was a war of attrition that resulted in unparalleled loss of life, and Verdun became a symbol of punishing trench warfare. Four years and eighteen million deaths later, it was all over.
That’s probably more or less how you’d summarize the First World War. Unless you’re a historian—in which case you’ll know, of course, that it wasn’t like that. The events of the war were much more complex, intricate and riddled with chance than the story in our heads would have us believe. In truth we still don’t understand why the war began in Serbia, specifically. There were numerous assassinations in those days (more than there are today). Germany could just as easily have declared war on France, or vice versa. We also don’t know why there was such drawn-out trench warfare. The various innovations in weapons technology that had appeared shortly beforehand (machine guns, tanks, poison gas, submarines and a nascent air force) seem, in retrospect, like they should have led to a much more fluid battle line.
The human brain is often compared to a computer. The comparison doesn’t work. Computers store raw data using bits, the smallest unit of information. Brains store not raw but processed data. Their preferred format is not the bit but the story. Why? Because our storage space is limited to our skulls. Eighty billion brain cells sounds like a lot, but it’s a far cry from what we’d need to store everything we see, read, hear, smell, taste, think and feel. So the brain has developed a data-compression trick: the story.
The real world has no stories. You could trudge through all seven continents for ten years with a magnifying glass, turning over every stone, and you wouldn’t find a single story. You’d fine stones, animals, plants, fungi… with a powerful microscope even cells, then molecules, then atoms and finally elementary particles. But no stories. Even if you’d been alive during the First World War, objectively speaking you wouldn’t have seen a world war—you’d have seen trenches filled with people wearing strange steel hats, forests consisting of nothing but tree stumps, bullets whistling through the air, and countless dead bodies, both human and horse.
How does the brain weave facts into memories? By binding them into a compact, consistent and causal story. Compact, consistent, causal—the three Cs. Compact: the stories are short, simplified and devoid of holes. Consistent: they’re contradiction-free. Causal: there’s a clear connection of cause to effect—A leads to B leads to C, and the developments make sense.
Our brains do this automatically. Not just with facts about wars, changes in the stock market or fashion trends, but also with our own lives. Constructing stories is the primary task of your remembering self, which you’ll recall from the previous chapter. Your life story tells you who you are, where you come from, where you’re going, what matters to you. It’s also called your “self” or your “self-image.” Your life story is compact: if somebody asks who you are, you’ll have a brief, succinct answer ready. It’s consistent: things that don’t fit are comfortably forgotten, and you plug gaps in your memory with astonishing inventive skill (a skill you don’t even know you have). It’s causal: your actions make sense—there’s a reason behind everything that happens in your life. Compact, consistent, causal.
Yet how realistic is the life story you carry around in your head? About as realistic as the portraits of me my three-year-old son does in chalk on the living-room wall. Perhaps now you’re saying: Okay, fine, but is that actually a problem? Too right it’s a problem! There are four reasons for this:
First: we change more rapidly than we think. This is true not just of our likes and dislikes (hobbies, favorite music, favorite food) but also of such supposedly inalterable things as personality traits and values. The person we’ll be in twenty or forty years, for whose future wellbeing we’re working so hard today—toiling seventy hours per week, bringing up children, buying a vacation home—is guaranteed to be a different person from the one we imagine. Perhaps this person won’t want a holiday home any more, and will look back uncomprehendingly at your heart attack and the seventy-hour weeks you spent working for anonymous taskmasters and shareholders.
Second: our life seems more amenable to planning than it actually is. Chance plays a far greater role than we’d like to think. The notion of fate, of Fortuna, the goddess of luck—an intellectual tool tried and tested over millennia—has been almost entirely expunged in the past hundred years. This is why we’re so devastated when something bad strikes out of the blue. Accidents, cancer, war, death. Until the previous century, such catastrophes were more readily accepted. People were mentally prepared for Fortuna’s visit. Today, fate signifies a “failure of the system.” Part of the good life, however, is putting the mental tool of Fortuna back in its rightful place.
Third: our fabricated life story makes it difficult to judge individual facts plainly—without interpretation, without context, without excuse. Excuses are brake pads that stop us learning from our mistakes.
Fourth: we see ourselves as better—more good-looking, more successful and more intelligent—than we really are. This self-serving bias leads us to run more risks than we would otherwise do. It leads us to think too highly of ourselves.
The end result is that we’re walking around with a false self-image, believing we’re less multi-layered, conflicted and paradoxical than we truly are. So don’t be surprised when somebody else judges you “incorrectly.” You do the same yourself. A realistic self-image can only be gleaned from someone who’s known you well for years and who’s not afraid to be honest—your partner or an old friend. Even better, keep a diary and dip back into it every now and again. You’ll be amazed at the things you used to write. Part of the good life is seeing yourself as realistically as possible—contradictions, shortcomings, dark sides and all. If you see yourself realistically, you’ve got a much better chance of becoming who you want to be.