The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

completely unrelated to what you started with? That’s
basically how our memories work.
We experience something. Then we remember it slightly
differently a few days later, as if it had been whispered and
misheard. Then we tell somebody about it and have to fill in
a couple of the plot holes with our own embellishments to
make sure everything makes sense and we’re not crazy. And
then we come to believe those little filled-in mental gaps,
and so we tell those the next time too. Except they’re not
real, so we get them a little bit wrong. And we’re drunk one
night a year later when we tell the story, so we embellish it
a little bit more—okay, let’s be honest, we completely make
up about one-third of it. But when we’re sober the next
week, we don’t want to admit that we’re a big fat liar, so we
go along with the revised and newly expanded drunkard
version of our story. And five years later, our absolutely,
swear-to-god, swear-on-my-mother’s-grave, truer-than-true
story is at most 50 percent true.
We all do this. You do. I do. No matter how honest and
well-intentioned we are, we’re in a perpetual state of
misleading ourselves and others for no other reason than
that our brain is designed to be efficient, not accurate.
Not only does our memory suck—suck to the point that
eyewitness testimony isn’t necessarily taken seriously in
court cases—but our brain functions in a horribly biased
way.
How so? Well, our brain is always trying to make sense of
our current situation based on what we already believe and
have already experienced. Every new piece of information is
measured against the values and conclusions we already
have. As a result, our brain is always biased toward what we
feel to be true in that moment. So when we have a great
relationship with our sister, we’ll interpret most of our
memories about her in a positive light. But when the
relationship sours, we’ll often come to see those exact same
memories differently, reinventing them in such a way as to