When I reminisce about my life, there are a lot of extremely unpleasant experiences that I look back fondly on. Getting stabbed in the hand. Bad relationships. Swim practice. As much as I know that these episodes were filled with sleep deprivation, light-to-substantial physical and mental torture, anxiety and aimlessness, the phrase 'good times' nonetheless finds its way to my lips, arising from some other place inside me that is not bound by skin and bones.
My former 'career' as a swimmer is a perfect example of this phenomenon. If you had asked me to rate my happiness 1-10 during any of the thousand 5am wake-ups, numbingly cold ocean swims or practices I went through from ages 13-22, the average rating would, to an anthropologist, show a creature whose great achievement in this finite life was the continuous pursuit of pain and tedium, while staring at the black line at the bottom of a pool. And yet, looking back, good times.
How do we measure a life? Would you prefer to have a life filled with achievement, even if you were unhappy while grinding away every day? Or would you prefer to have a happier day-to-day, even if that life didn't amount to much? Is there a way to have both? The fact that many experiences can be unhappy ones in the moment, and yet add meaning and richness to our lives, is an important consideration for choosing how we spend our time.
Daniel Kahneman discusses this conflict as a conflict between two types of selves: the 'remembering self' and the 'experiencing self.' The experiencing self is the self that lives within moment-to-moment window of attention. It's the self that answers when you are asked 'how do you feel right now?' The 'remembering self,' on the other hand, is the self that considers how things went and creates a story about the experience. According to Kahneman, these two selves have very different ideas about life, which are each subject to their own biases and errors. The remembering self, for example, seems to have a bias for good endings.
Redelmeier and Kahneman, 1996 looked into the difference between how a painful medical procedure was rated during and after the procedure. Surprisingly, a procedure that was shorter, but ended right after the highest moment of pain, was remembered as much worse than a procedure that was longer, with the intensity of the pain ending much lower. Even though the overall net amount of pain is greater, this result suggests that for painful procedures it might be wise to extend the length of a procedure so that it could end on period of lower pain.
Another study found that the overall positive experience of a symphony was remembered as much less positive when it ended on a literal sour note. A bad ending can ruin a positive experience, just like a better ending can soften a terrible one.
This bias of the remembering self is known as the peak-end rule. According to Wikipedia:
The peak–end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
In other words, people seem to weigh episodes of an experience according to not only how they felt during each moment but also how they felt when the experience was nearing its end.
In our lives there seems to be a bias toward our remembering selves, likely due to the fact that our memories are all we get to keep. What more are we, than our memories of our experiences? The peak–end rule has important consequences for how we evaluate the quality of their lives, and how we decide to live them. Should we go for what’s easy and comfortable, or try for the difficult and challenging? Maybe the answer is yes, but only if it ends well.
Perhaps the reason I fondly remember my career as a swimmer is because it ended on the highest of notes, with the peak achievement I had been chasing for years and years. If it had ended with a failure, like it did for many friends of mine, perhaps I would think it was all a waste of time.
But as it is, I’m lucky. It was good times.
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Ep 6. Good Bad Times