You take a vacation for the memory, not the trip
Our choices are guided by the story we will tell later, not by what we actually live through.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman was describing how people look back on their lives when he offered a test for anyone planning a trip.
Most of the time, he argued, we simply live through experiences and then forget most of what happens. Later we build a loose outline, a story about the episode, not a recording we can replay. “The remembering self is all we get to keep,” he said.
That distinction, as Kahneman tells it, splits each of us in two. There is a self that does the living and a self that evaluates the living. The paradox is that decisions are governed not by what actually happened, but by the story we keep about what happened.
Stories follow their own rules. Sequence matters and highlights matter, Kahneman said, but duration does not. In evaluated memories, time is barely represented at all, even though, as Kahneman put it, “time is the currency of life.”
Then came the vacation. Suppose you were informed that once your trip finishes you would get a drug that erases all memory of it, and all your photos would be destroyed. Would you still choose the same vacation?
Probably not, he said. “We go to vacations in large part to construct memories not to have experiences.” The trip you would pick with no memory left would likely differ from the one you would pick with memories intact.
Questions people ask
Does how long an experience lasts really not matter to memory?
He called it duration neglect. In his research, people judging a painful medical procedure or an unpleasant sound remembered the peak intensity and the ending, not how long it lasted. A longer episode with a milder ending could be remembered as better than a shorter one.
If memories run decisions, should we try to make experiences better or memories better?
He gave no prescription. He said he abandoned happiness research because he could not solve the problem. What makes the experiencing self happy in the moment and what makes the remembering self happy when looking back are different things.