Thinking, Fast and Slow in a life changing book written by our lord and savior Daniel Kahneman, Danny Kanny.

If you haven’t read this book you should drop everything that you’re doing and start reading it right away. It is extremely well written and easy to read, with short chapters and lucid Hemingway-styled language lacking any pretentiousness.

Danny Kanny posits a two system model for our minds. The faster system which is also the system truly in charge, Mr. System 1, has a lot of tasks, one of them being to make things appear mundane. It is the primary reason why every morning upon waking up you don’t fall into an existential crisis, or when you see a flight of stairs you don’t start pondering about their true meaning but you simply put one foot in front of the other and get on with it.

It does this by constantly forming a coherent story based on the information your senses are providing it and the information stored in your memory. However, being what we are today, we face questions in everyday life which have no answers. The amount of information in the world is so vast that it is impossible to form a coherent story but Mr. System 1 hasn’t evolved to deal with this and it insists on forming one, thus leading us astray.

And then we have Mr. System 2 which is more thorough and analytical but also lazy and demanding which we identify with ourselves but is really just a backup system that is brought into action when Mr. System 1 gets into trouble. While not entirely rational either, consulting Mr. System 2 for making important life decisions and training it is the only way to become more rational.

While I’m tempted to summarize the book I am bound to fail miserably as neither do I fully understand it, nor do I have the eloquence and skill necessary to undertake such an enormous writing project. Instead I’ve decided to write about the things that I myself am doing based on the wisdom acquired from this book. And so it goes.