Live Memoryless?

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is most famous for having written about the experience of flow, studied well-being in over 100,000 individuals by a technique called the Experience Sampling Method.1 He asked people to wear an electronic pager (ha!) for a week. When the pager went off, the participants were tasked with writing down how they felt and what they were thinking.

Csikszentmihalyi and his team at the University of Chicago learned much from this research, but one of the clearest, simplest findings was this: when people’s minds were off in the future or mired in the past, they were less happy. The evidence was unquestionably that people are happier when their minds are focused in the present moment.

People talk a lot about living in the moment, but what does that really mean? Examples abound. Not looking constantly at one’s phone or other screens. Being fully aware when one is spending time with children or other loved ones rather than worrying about work or planning one’s next golf outing. While these are excellent examples of present-focused living in practice, they don’t go to the essence of what it means to “be here now.”

There’s an old saying about death and material possessions: you can’t take it with you. We know that having a mind mired in the past keeps us from being fully present. So is it the case that if we want to “be here now” we must completely leave our past behind, forgetting about it completely as if it didn’t exist?

There is a concept from economics that I think does a great job of encapsulating the idea of truly living in the present moment—and in particular the elusive, even paradoxical, way that in doing so we must strive to live in balance with our past. The concept is called Markov perfect equilibrium.

Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) is used in game theory to analyze the decisions consumers and firms make when the only things that matter to their payoffs—that is, to the consumer’s satisfaction or the firm’s profits—are elements of the current state. Nothing from the past matters to MPE except things that contribute to the current state of affairs and so influence payoffs by means of that current state. The strategies chosen by consumers or firms in MPE have a property called memorylessness, because they quite literally are free of the direct influence of the past. (MPE derives its name from the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov, who identified the memoryless property of certain random processes.)

Consider a breakfast cereal company that sets the price for its corn flakes equal to what its sole competitor charges for its corn flakes. What the firm or its competitor might have charged in the past does not matter to the firm’s current pricing strategy, because the past has no effect on the profits the firm will earn today. The only thing that matters is how each firm is pricing its corn flakes now. When both firms set prices while considering only the current prices of their competitors, the pricing strategies constitute a MPE.

The Markov property of memorylessness offers a great metaphor for the balance between past and present that characterizes a life well lived. It may sound like a person living their life by a Markov strategy must forget the past entirely, carrying with them no memories. But that’s not actually how it works. Markov strategies are based only on the current state precisely because the current state is presumed to encode everything that matters about the past. So, paradoxically, when we live our life by a Markov strategy, we are “memoryless” without being truly memoryless. Our present selves carry with us in the fiber of our being everything that matters about our past, including our learning, our strengths, our unique character, and the wisdom of those who have influenced us. Even when we are present-focused, the past travels with us, a quiet companion and advisor.

What makes being memoryless so essential to present-focused living is that it involves letting go. A person cannot live properly in the present if their mind is going back again and again to the past. When we dwell in the past, mentally and emotionally, we end up trying to relive it in some form now. And if our life is endlessly recursive, we never truly live at all.

To truly live, you have to die a little. You must forget not only about the mistakes you’ve made but also about what went very well that you would just love to relive. A person can’t relive past glories a second time. One has to relinquish them.

Here, in this moment, is a world of beauty and fresh possibility. And the magic of the present moment is that it is memoryless and yet full of memory. The flowers in the neighbor’s yard are here today because of yesterday’s sun and rain and the dead matter in the soil from months and years past. How much you enjoy a three-mile run today in which you are completely present depends upon the work you’ve done to get in shape long before today began. And how much you get out of a lecture or podcast or book on which you are fully focused depends upon what your parents and teachers taught you as you were growing up, as well as what you attended or listened to or read last month.

Still: the key to the enjoyment of this moment is not to think about those things. Any thinking about the past is irrelevant—indeed distracts from your present enjoyment of what the past has brought to bear—because everything that matters about that past is already baked into the fantastic world that is here now. A fantastic world that includes the body and mind that you bring to experiencing it.

The song “In My Life,” written by John Lennon and performed by The Beatles, captures perfectly for me the essence of living memoryless… and how much it actually relies on a sort of “soul memory”—the spiritual equivalent of the body’s muscle memory.

Lennon writes:

There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all.

Up to this point, the song sounds like a classic remembrance of cherished places and people. It seems to be all about the past—and you might think Lennon was dwelling there. But he continues with a striking pivot to the present:

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new

Lennon concludes “In My Life” by resolving the tension he has created between past and present with a synthesis in which he ties the two together. The past lives on in him and won’t be forgotten. But ultimately he is here now:

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more.

Andrey Markov was a mathematician, not a songwriter or poet. But I think he would have liked where Lennon was going with this. And, more importantly, how he was getting there.