I found the ideas concerning experience vs. memory and the historical influences on pleasurable experiences to be very applicable to my own life as many of my personal experiences may have been distorted by how I perceived them. The mentioning of many research findings helped illuminate the complex details of the concepts discussed by Daniel Kahneman and Paul Bloom, which stimulated my remembering self as I recalled my own experiences and pop culture events. Kahneman provided an interesting assertion that there is a remembering self and an experiencing self that both have different roles within a person’s mind. This alone was an intriguing because the experiencing self was set on the present as that was what it was currently living and the remembering self told stories of the past. These separate entities are relevant to any person as we all have memories, but the happiness we find in them depends on how we portray them and our expectations before experiencing them. For instance, during a winter break I went on a trip to Florida in which I expected the warm climate and fun activities to make my vacation worthwhile. Looking back, these expectations may have widely distorted the actual amount of enjoyment I experienced, but my difficulty to fully recall events that occurred also lowers the happiness in my remembering self. Bloom however discussed the matter of all people being essentialists and that the amount of pleasure we find in certain aspects depends on the valued history of it. The true nature of the stimuli is very important to people in cosmopolitan societies especially as we find less pleasure in imitations or copies of the real desired object. He mentions a study done on people in regards to how much they’d pay for George Clooney’s sweater after certain circumstances, and there are multiple auctions such as these of objects derived from pop culture celebrities. All people want the real thing and they want the authenticity of it as well as the freedom to show their object off to others to further increase the value they perceive it to have. I once saw an auction on ebay of a water bottle used by Justin Bieber to be sold for almost $1000, and although not everyone would pay so outrageously much, it further proves that the history of objects truly change how our society experiences them. These assertions made by Kahnneman and Bloom were especially absorbing to listen to as almost all of the points they discussed were applicable to every day people. Our perceptions and thoughts on pleasure are truly distorted by how we experience or recall them, as well as the history we seek before engaging in them.