Skip to main content

No future without the past


Is it possible for anyone to shed the ‘baggage’ of the past and turn a clean, new leaf in life? A few years back, some eminent psychologists studied this and came to the conclusion that our ability to envision the future is strongly influenced by our memory of the past. In other words, we tend to use memories of past experiences to predict what our life will be like in the future.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the field of behavioural economics, uses an example to illustrate how our memories shape our thoughts and feelings. A person had dinner at a restaurant. Everything went well. The food was delicious, the wine wonderful. Memorable dinner. You would recommend the restaurant to anyone. Just then something goes wrong. The waiter spills some coffee on your elegant suit. Odds are that the coffee spill will taint your memory of the food and the wine.

What lingers on is memory rather than experience, argues the psychologist. Further he says that the decisions we make are based on our memories, not our experiences. The restaurant triggers your unpleasant memory whenever someone asks your opinion about it. Life is a continuous series of moments of experience, says Kahneman. Once these moments are passed, most of them are lost forever.  Kahneman calculated that the psychological presence of an experience lasts about three seconds.

But memories linger on. You cannot wish them away. They are not baggage you carry on your back which you can put down when you feel like doing so. They are more like the stains on your suit that refuse to fade, all the stain removers notwithstanding.  

The situation becomes much worse if these bad memories have been reinforced by further similar experiences. Take the case of a woman ditched by her boyfriend. She overcomes the trauma and learns to place her trust in another man. Imagine her being ditched by him too. The likelihood of her ever retaining any trust in her heart for another man is almost nil.

The bad past is not an excess baggage carried by us.  They become integral parts of our very being. Memories are not mere experiences. They are the marks left in your soul by the experiences. How deep are the marks, how durable they are, these decide whether you can escape from them while planning your future.

PS. This post is my response to a discussion that took place in a blog by Pranju Chakrapani.





Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 25, 2016 at 10:25 PM

    The likelihood of her getting ditched by her boyfriend for the third time consecutively is also nil, by the Bayesian probability theory. If deep are those memories, deeper still is perhaps the yearning for some better memories. Sometimes 'pretending' to forget those memories might become dumping of those 'baggages' :) But yes, to consider past memories as baggages is literally, not metaphorically, speaking incorrect

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 26, 2016 at 6:31 AM

      The likelihood of her getting ditches for the third time is nil because she won't ever fall in love anymore and not because of the Bayesian probability theory. :)

      My personal experience: I left a job about a decade and a half back because of the treatment I received from a religious sect. I found a job in a secular institution in Delhi. Then came, the bliss of a decade and a half later, another religious sect led by a godman and his women as well as thugs. These wolves in sheep's clothing destroyed the educational institution totally, assaulted people, got some imprisoned by fabricating false charges including molestation of those witchy women... Now you know why I puke every time I see a religious person. I don't need a third experience though I'm waiting for it!

      Memories can be baggage if they are not pleasant ones. Metaphorically, of course.

      Delete
  2. ShaiviJuly 26, 2016 at 12:15 AM

    Once bitten twice shy. Our decisions are based on our past experiences and impressions.

    ReplyDelete
  3. sunaina sharmaJuly 26, 2016 at 3:05 AM

    How do you differentiate memory from experience? Isn't all that we experience becoming a part of our memory? Isn't it "integral" as you put in the end?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 26, 2016 at 6:37 AM

      Experience is what actually happened and memory is your mind's interpretation of it. The example of the restaurant. What happened was a pleasant experience. Good dinner. But a small mistake by the waiter is what remains in the mind. The stain on the suit remains while the delicious food and wine and beautiful environment all disappear. What becomes 'integral' is the memory and not the actual experience.

      Delete
    2. DeepaliJuly 26, 2016 at 4:15 PM

      Thats what exactly came to my mind. Memory is made up of one or many experiences. Can you actually isolate the two. However, one memory can have more than one experiences (like in restaurant situation). What we choose to store as memory lies with us. Isnt it. However, if the ratio of bad experiences is higher in a memory, the mind will certainly ignore anything good happened during the same time frame and create a "bad memory" for that incident/place/time.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 26, 2016 at 6:35 PM

      The last part of your comment is the answer. Deepali. It's all in your mind and the personality that is already stained by a lot of past experiences. I'm sure you've heard the jovial description: An optimist is a person who looks for a garden when he smells flowers and a pessimist is a person who looks for a coffin :) It's all in the mind. It's all in the memory. It's all conncected with experiences.

      Delete
  4. Swati BatraJuly 26, 2016 at 11:57 AM

    It also depends upon how we perceive things. Our own understanding. Sometimes bad incidents which happened in past, shape up our present personality or thought process.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 26, 2016 at 6:36 PM

      Perception, perspective, memory, mind, consciousness... the terms are endless. But I thought I was saying something very simple :(

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
9 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more