One of the most important lessons of Thinking, Fast and Slow is that our brains are unable to analyze real world data objectively. We alter our memories and retroactively modify our experiences to fit a story. The only solution to this is to keep records and to trust the data.

For me, the two most easily measurable resources are internet usage and money. After reading the book I was sure I wasn’t being honest with myself about these things.

Now, I’m not anal about this. I’ve set up apps on chrome and alerts on my credit cards so that at the end of the day/month I can simply copy the numbers into a spreadsheet, takes less than 5 mins. (I use webtime-tracker for tracking my internet usage, which I highly recommend.)

Here are some of the discrepancies I discovered:

Black Swans:
Turns out the things I spend the most on are the unplanned, unscheduled things, like an impromptu trip to Florida, or books I randomly bought on Amazon, applying to a new conference, joining a new club, re-buying things I lost or broke etc. And these random events are not one off, these are very consistent, something always comes up every single month which requires me to achingly pull out my credit card, these are the inevitable Black Swans.

Coffee and Alcohol:
I drink a lot of coffee and I drink alcohol only occasionally. But contrary to what I thought I spend far more on alcohol than on coffee. Turns out coffee is really cheap (somehow in my mind I’m always at a café drinking expensive Lattés). On the other hand when I spend money on alcohol it’s a far greater amount, I don’t think I’ve ever had just one drink.

Social Media:
I watch a lot of Youtube and wasn’t surprised to see it top the list of websites I spent the most time on, but my favorite part is that facebook is nowhere near the top, in fact, when I’m not on Youtube I spend most of the time online doing something productive (tears of joy). I feel less guilty of myself for surfing the internet now.

The Secret Evil:
2 day ago I made an account on chess.com to “take a break” once in a while, but guess what, the day I made the account I ended up spending 3 hours on it, and I’ve no recollections of doing this.

So what’ve I learnt?

1. As long as I don’t develop an expensive habit, the best way to save money is to make money. I cannot control my expenses but I do have some control on my earnings.
2. Café hopping is not an expensive habit, but pause before drinking that first beer of the evening.
3. Watch less Youtube and don’t obsess over social media usage, it’s not that bad.
4. Don’t play fucking online games, not even chess, not even to “take a break”, this is not unlike a drug addiction.

There’s the risk of rationalizing these conclusions but there are no explanations for these. These are the things that are true for me because of the various random variables in my life, and as they change so will these conclusions.

I’m sure I’ll find more things about myself if I keep this habit up, but already I feel weirdly liberated. It’s as if I’ve externalized the tedious computations that my brain would otherwise do. As if at some level the brain knew that it was doing an extremely shoddy job but did not want me to know how much it was struggling, I almost feel pity for it.

Now it’s finally free to think about more important things in life, like Maths and Art.

I’ll leave you with this talk by Danny Kanny on memories and experiences,