By Sarah Kass
A few years ago, my daughter went on a two-day camping trip with her class. During those two days, she called me countless times to complain—about the heat, the hike, the food, the tent, the other kids. You name it, she hated it.
Months later, our family went on a road trip that took us by the area of my daughter’s camping trip. As we approached, I braced myself, fully expecting a recap of the familiar complaints. But something unexpected happened.
Instead of regaling us with negativity, my daughter lit up with excitement. "There’s my campsite!" she said glowingly. "My campsite! I love that place!" Her recollection couldn’t have been more different from what she’d experienced at the time.
As it turns out, this isn’t unique to my daughter. According to Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, we all do this. It’s because each of us has two selves—an experiencing self and a remembering self. In his 2010 TED Talk called “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory,” Kahneman described each.
Our experiencing self, he said, “lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present.” Our remembering self is the storyteller—”the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life.”
When we go to an amazing concert and get stung by a bee on the way out, we say the bee ruined the whole experience. But according to Daniel Kahneman, we’re wrong. The bee didn’t ruin the experience itself—it ruined the memory of the experience. The concert was still amazing. But the memory of the concert—and the story we tell—is not amazing. It’s about how the bee ruined the concert.
It works the other way, too. If a bad experience—say, a miserable school camping trip—ends with something unexpected and delightful—perhaps a surprise stop at the Dairy Queen on the way back?—the bad experience becomes a good memory. (I didn’t dare ask my daughter!)
According to Kahneman, our "remembering self" does more than recall the past or tell stories—it’s the part of us that makes choices. As he puts it, “We actually don't choose between experiences; we choose between memories of experiences.” Even when we think about the future, we don’t imagine it as a series of experiences—we imagine it as “anticipated memories.” It's the memory of the past that becomes prologue.
This helps explain why social media is so addicting. The happy photos we post when we're feeling low become part of the story we tell ourselves—and the story we tell our friends. We rely on those memories, and on others believing them, to override how we really feel.
It also explains the tradition of handing out goody bags at the end of a child’s birthday party. We rely on the party favors to do us a favor—to drown out the tantrums, the hurt feelings, and the spilling that were invariably large parts of the experience.
So what does all of this mean for those of us who design experiences—whether in shops, classrooms, or at large events? It suggests we should pay close attention to what Daniel Kahneman calls the “peak-end rule”—the psychological principle that people judge an experience not by its entirety, but by how they felt at its most intense moment and at the end.
Sure, membership points, door prizes, and coupons are all efforts to leave a good final impression. But what if we aimed for something more meaningful? A simple act of kindness, a genuine question, a small moment of connection—these are the things that linger. These are the experiences that become memories.