My attempt to imbed a video:
In this TED talk by behavior economist Daniel Kahneman there is a fair bit of psychological talk that I’m not sure I get, but his discussion of the difference in happiness of our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” gave me some insight into what to expect from childbirth. An example of how these two selves see happiness differently, he tells a story of a man who listened to 20 minutes of glorious music only to have a horrible sound come at the very end, which he claims ruined the whole experience. Of course it had no influence on the 20 minutes of enjoying his experiencing self had had, but all he was left with was his memory, so his remembering self could only look on the experience as a bad one. The fact that the end experience influences greatly the view of the whole experience given by the remembering self lead me to the conclusion that I cannot use any descriptions given by mothers to prepare myself for what childbirth will be like as I actually experience it. I fully intend to forget all the pain and remember the most beautiful moment in the world when my tiny baby is placed in my arms, and maybe living that future memory in my head during labor will decrease the discomfort (a lovely word often used to describe labor pains) for my experiencing self, but it’s unclear how much this knowledge can change the happiness of the two selves.
As for earning money, at the end of the video Kahneman shares a statistic that shows that the less one earns per year the more unhappy the experiencing self is. The catch is that once income reaches $60,000 (for an American) the line is flat: there is no increase in experiential happiness. It’s all in the head: the happiness of the remembering self still continues to increases with increasing income. So I say get your satisfaction with your life from other sources and you’ve saved yourself years of work at the office. Use the extra time to make a load of memorable experiences and the happiness of the remembering self (the one we mostly live out of and base or view of ourselves and our lives on) will be better than a millionaire!
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Yesterday we took some belly pictures and this was hubby's choice for the blog. I don't stay in this position always, but I do tend to reflect and "hold" my baby when I feel "es" moving. I shouldn't mix by German and English, but it is terribly convenient that "das Baby" in German is not masculine or feminine so one can use the pronoun "es" without implying anything - neither sex nor non-human status. We're at 22 or 23 weeks, depending on how you count.
