Shahar Madjar, MD, Journal columnist

In my last article, I wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tell ourselves stories in order to identify cause-and-effect, to find patterns, and to draw conclusions from our success and failure. A story is a survival mechanism wrapped in words.” I also discussed the tendency to organize the narratives we create into a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I asked, “Which of the three parts (beginning, middle, and ending) of the stories we tell ourselves is taking the central stage in our minds? Should we attempt to change the narrative we compose about our lives?”

I started thinking about the subject when I was reading Daniel Kahneman’s book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ Daniel Kahneman is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and the recipient of the 2002 Noble Prize in Economics. ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ is 499 pages long. It suggests that our minds drive the way we think using two systems. One system is fast and relies on intuition and feelings; the other is slower, deliberate and logical.

Because I am fascinated by stories-the way they are written, and what we can learn from them-I found a special interest in chapter 36, ‘Life As A Story,’ in which Kahneman writes, ” … we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.”

We also assign great significance to the way stories end, and more so when it comes to our own life story. No matter how good a story is, we want the ending to be surprising, memorable, or at least meaningful: a detective story that ends with a twist; a fairy tale that teaches us the enduring nature of true love.

Some writers extend their understanding of a good ending to their own life. Their lives read like a novel, their death like a grand finale. Take Ernest Hemingway as an example. In the early morning hours of July 2, 1961, he “quite deliberately” shot himself with a “double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend.” What thoughts and feelings passed through Ernest Hemingway’s mind in the hours before he squeezed the trigger? He left no suicide letter and no explanation, but the way he died will remain forever etched in the public’s memory. His death is a part of his life narrative and as an ending to his life story, it is dramatic and grand. His writing life is a testament to the significance he saw in endings, as a way of providing meaning and closure. He wrote 47 different endings to ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ before picking up what he saw as the most suitable one.

In ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ Kahneman writes that our focus on the ending is a trick our intuitive mind plays on us: we tend to give disproportionate significance to the ending (even if the ending lasts for a short duration) and minimize and sometimes completely disregard the weight of the beginning and that of the middle (he calls this phenomenon ‘Duration neglect’).

The astute observer will find examples for ‘duration neglect’ everywhere: who hasn’t witnessed a happy relationship that lasted for years and then turned sour and ended in a separation? Which part of the story will the couple remember more vividly-the happy long marriage or the bitter divorce? The same applies to the workplace: a firing from the workplace after even the longest, most successful career would often evoke feelings of anger and grief.

Here is what I have learned from ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’: when it comes to forming a narrative-about your work, your love-life, or your life in general-try to overcome the initial tendency to see the end as the most important part of the story. Instead, allow for the more deliberate system-the one that involves slow, logical thinking-to play a greater role.

What about the stories we tell ourselves about the future? I try to reflect on my own life and this is what I see: when making decisions about my future, I consider the options, weigh probabilities, examine outcomes, and foresee a myriad of endings. In other words, I turn to slow thinking as if it were a remedy for all of my worries, a guarantee against all failures and disappointments, an insurance policy against all unfavorable endings. And I ask myself, wouldn’t it be better if I could give my fast-thinking a greater voice, take a leap of faith, and just jump into whatever lies ahead? After all, the end of the story is not the story, it’s just how one story ends and another begins.