I've had an interesting chat with a good friend of mine who is thinking about changing careers, leaving the security of a job at a big company to - maybe - go freelance or start her own business. There are many reasons for her to take this decision - the long hours and the frustrating hierarchy at the big company - but when we talked, it seemed that the most important reason was just that it was time to change, time to try something new because the current job, although demanding and interesting at the beginning, had started to become dull. It seems to me that this is a quite widespread feeling: More and more people opt for a career and lifestyle where they change directions more often, take more leaps - and more risks.

Shortly after the conversation with my friend, I watched this TED Talk by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (embedded below). In it, Kahneman notes that there are two "selves": an experiencing self, and a remembering self. They work very differently: The remembering self, which creates our memory and, in Kahnemans words, tells us stories, places more emphasis on changes than on sheer length of an experience. For example, while the experiencing self would see a significant difference between a one-week vacation and an equally good two-week vacation, the remembering self would rate them almost equally if nothing had changed from the first to the second week.

One could argue thus that people who often want to try "something new" are more driven by their remembering selves than their experiencing selves. I wonder whether that's true, and whether there's actually a bigger shift in this direction.

(Somehow, this also relates to one of the six big themes of 2010 that we identified at Sandbox: Do what you love and get paid for it.)