῀ 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