῀ essay 19
True remembered thrills?
Award-winning author, scriptwriter and producer Bill Dare explores whether a holiday is better in the moment or, heavily edited, in the memory
Illustrations Brett Ryder I’m going to make you an offer. It’s for a free two-week holiday. It can be wherever you like, and you can go with whomever you chose. Want childcare? I’ll lay it on. Or maybe you’d like to go alone and have a holiday romance – something I can also guarantee. You can climb mountains, swim with dolphins or go kayaking down the Colorado River. I will assure your safety. You can meet orang-utans, make beautiful friendships… oh, and the food! Every bite will be memorable. Ah. Did I say memorable? I didn’t mean to. You see, I’m a demon, and you’d expect there to be a catch. And here it is: as soon as you get off the plane or boat or train from your holiday you will forget everything. Those photographs and videos you took? They will disappear. So will the souvenirs, and anything else you bought. No one will be able to remind you of the great times you had – not even the people you met – and you won’t see them again. Just for good measure, your tan will be replaced with pallid skin tone you set off with. So, do we have a deal? (Most people I’ve asked don’t leap at the chance.) Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahnemen, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, examines the nature of our two Selves. We have an Experiencing Self: the part of us that lives in the present,
and actually enjoys things in the moment; and then there’s the Remembering Self: the part that wants to collect memories, to help us form a general assessment of how our lives are going. The fascinating conclusion at which Kahneman arrives, is that many, possibly most, of our choices are made by the Remembering Self. And here’s something rather disturbing: our Remembering
enjoying the scene itself. When we take photographs, we are being controlled by our Remembering Self, which is tyrannically pushing our Experiencing Self out of the way. It’s why we buy souvenirs and why most of us prefer travelling with a companion with whom we can one day reminisce. We rarely take photos of miserable events or rainy days. We want to construct
The Remembering Self pays little attention to how long an experience lasts Self is a bit of a tyrant. It wants to improve the quality of our future memories, not our future experience. In fact, our Remembering Self doesn’t really care if we’re enjoying the moment; it only cares about how the moment will be recalled. Memory is our only means of getting a perspective on how happy we are over time. We want to look back on a year, a week, a holiday or an entire life and feel it’s been worth it. So it’s little wonder we often give as much attention to taking a picture of a wonderful scene than
a happy past for ourselves, even if it’s biased. When it comes to assessing how much we enjoyed a holiday, we are not reliable witnesses. For an accurate measure of how happy we are, we’d need to keep a daily or even hourly score – and experimenters have done just that with volunteers. The interesting thing is, these scores don’t accurately match our memories of how we were enjoying the experience. Our memories play tricks. One trick is called Duration Neglect: we don’t
pay much attention to how long an experience lasts. For example, our Remembering Self will tend to think a happy picnic that lasts one hour gives us the same amount of pleasure as one that lasts for three – and yet any objective measure would indicate that a three-hour happy picnic will bring three times more pleasure. (Tip: if you want memorable holidays, go on lots of short ones). Another trick our Remembering Self plays is that, when we assess an event, we pay much more attention to how it ends than any other part of it. If we’re mugged on the last day of a holiday, we will say ‘it ruined our whole holiday’. But how can that be? The bad experience can’t go back in time and destroy all that pleasure we had for the previous six days. But the Remembering Self doesn’t
20 essay ῀
care about how much fun we actually had; it cares only for the story we tell ourselves. And as we all know, a story with a sad ending is a sad story, no matter how happy everyone was until that last page. The third trick is to do with peak experiences and unusual ones – our Remembering Selves love both. A holiday can be pretty dull, even rather tedious, but if we have a fantastic experience in a hot air balloon or a magical evening with a special someone we’ve just met, then this will distort our view of the whole holiday. We know this, which is why those hawkers selling inflatable banana boat rides are rarely short of customers. (Although, to be fair, going on a banana boat might be pretty exciting for our Experiencing Selves as well.) We take photographs all the time, and we don’t need a camera (not even one on a phone) to do it. If you think about your last holiday now, you will probably see three or four snapshot images. Your Remembering Self takes these pictures and stores them, and it much prefers something unusual. You may have a lovely few hours walking along a beach, but your Remembering Self is only likely to keep a photograph of that strangely shaped rock, or the clown unicycling along the sand. This will, more than likely, affect your assessment of the whole walk. It can also provide a title: That Walk When I Saw The Unicycling Clown. So now that you know about the two Selves, who is choosing your holiday: your Remembering Self or your Experiencing Self? A clue is in the type of trip you’re drawn to. If it’s complete relaxation by the beach with a few good books you want, then you probably need to de-stress, and maybe don’t care how memorable it is. In fact, you might even be so
in need of a rest, you’d take my offer of the free holiday that you never remember. You’re being guided by your Experiencing Self. On the other hand, are you thinking of swimming with dolphins, trekking through a jungle, climbing Kilimanjaro? Then it may well be you feel the need to replenish your stock of memories. Your Remembering Self, as an astrologer might say, is in the ascendant. It won’t mind how arduous the climb or exhausting the trek through the jungle, or how many times you get bitten – that’s your Experiencing Self ’s problem. Your Remembering Self knows that, when you return, you will have improved
the global view you have of your life. This will help give you a feeling of success, peace, happiness. Before I go, I’m going to make you another offer. This time, I guarantee the holiday will be a disaster. A week of delays, bad food, noisy hotel. You’ll have your money stolen and get a serious bout of food poisoning. However, as soon as you get off the plane, train or boat, you will forget every single ghastly moment. And I’ll give you enough money to spend on the trip of a lifetime. Not interested? OK, how about this, and this is my final offer. You keep half the money, and you don’t go on a trip. But I give you the memories
of the most amazing holiday you can possibly imagine, complete with photographs, videos and souvenirs. You will be utterly convinced you had the time of your life. Do we have a deal? Q BILL DARE is an author, scriptwriter and producer who has created many award-winning radio and TV shows, including Dead Ringers, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, The Now Show, and Brian Gulliver’s Travels – Radio 4’s very funny satire on 21stcentury social mores and moral dilemmas – which he has turned into a book, to be published by Pilrig Press on 4 July