Is All Well That Ends Well?

But I hadn’t actually hated the experience as it was happening. I loved 80 of the 81 hours I spent watching it. So why do I describe something that was 99% joy as being a bad experience?

This highlights a distinction in cognitive psychology between the experiencing self and the remembering self.

• The experiencing self describes how you are reacting as you are living in the present. If you’d asked me how much fun I was having during any of the first 80 hours, my experiencing self would have said “This show RULES! I’m having such a good time!”
• The remembering self creates narratives to help us form memories, and my remembering self has a very different answer.

As Joar Vittersø puts it, “the experiencing self is about being happy IN your life, whereas the remembering self is about being happy WITH your life.”

This distinction between events as we experience them and how we think of them in retrospect is profound and has the potential to affect nearly every realm of our lives. Our choices about whether to pursue emotionally intimate relationships depend on how we remember being treated by previous partners. Our decisions about whether to have medical procedures are influenced by our memories of those we’ve had in the past.

And yet, our memories of events may not accurately reflect how we felt as they were happening. 

One reason for the mismatch is that our remembering self appears to ignore duration: a long vacation isn’t remembered as being more enjoyable than a shorter one (despite the fact that the experiencing self had longer to have fun)! 80 hours of enjoying a show isn’t enough to offset 1 hour spent unhappy.

In addition to ignoring duration, the remembering self overemphasizes the end of the experience. Imagine two people have the same unpleasant medical procedure but one of them has five additional slightly unpleasant minutes added to the end. The person with the longer procedure therefore has more total time spent in discomfort, so their experiencing self certainly has the worse deal. However, when asked about the procedures later, the person with the longer one tends to recall it more favorably!¹ How can adding more unpleasant time improve their memory of it? 

It appears that as our remembering self tries to characterize our experience, it emphasizes the most intense point (the “peak”) and the final moments (the "end”) rather than the average of the whole experience. If we improve the end, it colors our memory of the whole thing. In contrast, a bad ending can taint your memory of the whole experience—this was the case for my TV show, but also applies to happy relationships that end in bad breakups. 

Why might our minds use this “peak-end rule”? Wouldn’t it be more beneficial for our memories to fully and accurately represent our experiences? The gap between experience and memory reflects a general tendency of human cognition to try to simplify experiences for easier processing. We form memories to guide future decisions, not to create perfect records. For example, if you’re deciding whether to return to a restaurant, remembering the best dish (the peak) and how you felt leaving (the end) probably gives you enough information to decide whether to go again, without needing to store every detail. 

This simplification typically serves us well because it preserves information efficiently. But it can also lead us astray: we may end up structuring our lives around creating good memories rather than having good experiences. 

Daniel Kahneman (who first described the distinction between the experiencing and remembering self) said:

"What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self." 

Breaking free of the tyranny of the remembering self doesn’t mean ignoring how we’ll remember things. Memories matter: they shape our identities and inform future decisions. But let’s not forget to ask whether we’re enjoying something in the moment rather than whether it will be a good story later.

Consider the person who spends their time in a lovely place seeing it through a camera lens (to share and look at later) rather than focusing on the beauty of the place itself. They are not so much having an experience as preparing to remember it.

We naturally privilege memories over experiences because memories are what we carry forward—the remembering self is always writing the story we’ll tell. However, this means our experiencing self can get shortchanged. A happy relationship that ended with heartbreak was still a happy relationship, and the sadness at the end does not erase the time spent being happy. Looking back, I can acknowledge that my 80 hours watching the show were genuinely joyful, even if the ending wasn't what I would have wanted. The experiencing self had a great time, and that matters, too. So, the challenge we face is learning to value both the stories we tell and the moments we’re actually living.

(Keep scrolling for show reveal.)

Notes:
1. If you’re wondering about the ethics of doing research that involves making unpleasant medical procedures take longer, the upside is that people with the slightly longer procedure not only rated it as more pleasant, but were more likely to come in for more preventative care in the future. Therefore, the additional unpleasantness may actually increase medical compliance)!