Think fast! Or slow?

I've just finished reading Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and the urge to write about it was simply overwhelming. Finishing a book always leaves me in a limbo between satisfaction, pride, and that uncomfortable feeling of having created a new void: "Now, what am I going to read?"

Every now and then, one comes across books that come and go without leaving a significant mark, but this one turned my world upside down. It's incredible how much it changed my perspective on life and completely altered the way I think.

I've been trying for a long time to make sense of many of the things the book helped me understand. There were countless times while reading when I thought: "Now everything makes sense."

In a reading for the course 'Ethics for Communicators', I learned that we don't know reality as it is, but rather live in interpretative worlds. This idea resonated deeply with Kahneman's theories about how our cognitive biases shape our perception of reality. I couldn't agree more: there are as many realities as there are people in the world.

The entire book is a gem and I believe it's a must-read for everyone, but I think my favorite part is where the "Remembering Self" comes into play. This made me think about how many of the things we do, we do thinking about how nice they will look in our minds as memories. This plays a super important role when evaluating our own lives. I believe we should be fairer to our "Experiencing Self" and let it do just that: enjoy the moment without thinking of it as a future memory. After all, the "Experiencing Self" is the one who makes the most use of our time, the one who "gives content to our life".

This was one of the best readings assigned to me during my career; it definitely makes it into the top 5. A special greeting to my professor from the "Statistics for Communication" course who nailed it with the recommendation.