“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

What does it mean?

Whatever you are attending to swells. Nothing, he says, is as important as you think it is while it has your attention. The usual reading calls this the focusing illusion: the focal item crowds out the rest of a life. A competing reading hears that nothing matters, which would cancel the book. He is talking about a bias in judgement, especially when people predict how an event will change their happiness. The sentence is chapter 38. Attention is the magnifier. Importance is what the magnifier counterfeits.

Did Daniel Kahneman really say this?

The library’s label is Well attested. His English, the focusing illusion as he states it at the end of chapter 38. Page 402 of the 2011 Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition. The 'when' is his; posters sometimes print 'while'.

Where it comes from

Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), chapter 38, Thinking about Life, p. 402

Approximate date: 2011.

How to use it

A single bad meeting in a Newcastle week can feel like the whole job if you narrate it all evening. The sentence asks you to put the meeting back in the week. It does not say the meeting was fine. It says the focus overshot.

A mindset reading

Use it on your own forecasts of misery or bliss, which is his topic. Using it to tell someone their grief is an illusion is crueller than the chapter.

Understand the philosophy

Chapter 38 is 'Thinking about Life'. The key term is the focusing illusion, and this sentence is its short form. WYSIATI, chapter 7, is the cousin: what is in attention is treated as all there is. The page number is 402 in the edition named on the card. The wording with 'when' is his.

Related

• “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”

  Well attested

• “I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is.”

  Well attested

• “It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”

  Well attested

Related bias. Availability bias. Availability bias judges how common something is by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid, recent, or personal cases feel frequent. A dull record of ordinary cases is harder to recall and gets underweighted.

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