Two Modes of Going Through Life

The experiential and the intellectual

Each and every single one of our actions reflects a value — usually many at once. There is, at any time, an infinite set of other possible choices. In the past decades, this notion has transformed from a philosopher’s thought experiment into psychological reality for many, frequently leading to decision fatigue and paralysis among those theoretically blessed with extensive possibilities. On what basis are we to take all these decisions?

As far as human psychology goes, one of the clearest simple truths that arises time and time again is that we truly come to appreciate what we have when it’s gone. Just now, traveling through India and inhaling Delhi’s fumes, have I come to directly experience how essential good air quality is. I knew that before. In theory. But I’d venture to say that “good air quality” is as interesting to anyone living with clean air as someone else’s tax records. It just conjures up mundane statistics. There appears to be nothing real about it. Until the very air you breathe makes you cough and want to move inside again as fast as possible. Where I live, “going outside” is often used synonymously with “getting some fresh air”. In Delhi, you better stay home if you want decent air.

Now, though I’ve come to find air quality developments and movement of pollutants quite interesting by now, this isn’t a rant about air quality differences specifically. It carved out a simple thought more finely. One, which I had recurringly observed passing me by lately, never quite grasping its significance.

Experiencing personally what you know intellectually puts you into an entirely different mode of being.

Of course, I could have told you at any point that someone describing a night out or a dance class to me is different from experiencing those things myself. That is something of a moot point and not what I’m talking about here.

Let me simplify for the sake of argumentation. At a high level, one way of describing human brains is that they process information. This can take many forms and of course through our actions we shape our environment, leading to different future incoming information streams. Now, assume there are two modes any person may inhabit. Think of them as different channels any incoming information passes through. One is the experiential mode; the other is the cognitive — intellectual mode.

There is absolutely nothing inherently complex about this. A kid playing in the street takes in all its environmental information, its own bodily sensations and its internal cognitive and emotional processes. The presence of thoughts or reasoning does nothing to the fact that this kid is mainly in experiential mode. It is engaging with the world around it. To avoid oversimplification just let me point out that neuropsychologically, this is obviously a spectrum. If you like, just read “dominating mode in the current moment” whenever I refer to one of the modes. Now, while this kid is living out its experience and directly interacting with its environment, the person working a 9–5 in an office staring at a screen is presumably in cognitive — intellectual mode during most of these hours. What’s the main difference? Two things, mainly: Interaction and Abstraction.

Do we care?

By interaction, I mean social and environmental interaction. The kind, which results from moving around in the world or in someone else’s personal emotional landscape. It is highly related to empathy and creates feelings of connection, community and caring. The last of those is the one that has increasingly permeated my thinking lately. For I can know all the world’s statistics. Honestly, I still won’t truly care. It’s not that I don’t care about, say, the close to a billion people still living malnourished or undernourished even though we have the means worldwide to feed everyone several times over. It’s that if someone throws this fact out, it might make me sad for a second, I might even ponder it for an hour, probably just to come to the conclusion that there are infinitely many issues to contemplate and I’m in no way better suited or qualified to act on them than the next person. But I still won’t really care. The emotional reaction is superficial and short — lasting. In the end, this is just one more snippet of information out of thousands a day. Caring doesn’t scale well.

I think it is relevant here to clarify that I don’t always use information in the exact same way. Before, I was using information as basically anything making itself amenable to our perception, namely all kinds of sensory inputs which may be acted upon. Right now, I was referring to information in the more colloquial societal sense — information as facts, data. It’s not a sharp distinction yet still an important one.

Now imagine, I were to go to live in some dirt — poor place for an extended time. Possibly quite the eye — opening experience for a white guy from a wealthy Western country. Do you think I wouldn’t care after that either? It’s possible but I’d probably need quite some sociopathic potential. Let’s say I only go for some days. Still, I’m now in an entirely different mode of being: The experiential mode. And from now on, let me guarantee you: Any “data” related to hunger will immediately be wired to this intense experience. The saliency of related incoming information will increase. It’s like a new hub was built in my brain. And thus, I truly start to care.

Zooming out

Much of Western society is built on abstraction. Collectively, the intellectual element has come to far outweigh the experiential one. I won’t go into all the developments that have recently contributed to this but (probably needless to say), social media and insane screen times don’t exactly favor an experiential mode of being.

For many of the societal and planetary issues we face, intellectually driven and technological solutions are proposed. Don’t get me wrong here, I very much appreciate abstract intellectual thought and have a childish excitement for new technology. Yet, fundamentally, I do believe that we don’t lack tools and mechanistic understanding. Rather, with a true willingness from many people (especially those taking big decisions), we could make incomparably more progress on tackling our largest issues. In the long run, we would be on a different developmental trajectory altogether. This willingness, I believe, starts with caring. And that’s quite a good basis for decision — taking.

This article is the starting point of a series, which I plan to be a deeper dive on this dichotomy of the Experiential mode vs. the Cognitive — Intellectual mode. In future posts, I will investigate the neuroscience behind it, as well as some historic and cultural developmental trends along this axis in different societies.