The Sense of an Ending

When people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length—a phenomenon called “duration neglect.” Instead, they seem to rate the experience based on two key moments: (1) the best or worst moment, known as the “peak”; and (2) the ending. Psychologists call it the “peak-end rule.”

I thought about that movie with Jack Nicholson where he plays an obsessive-compulsive novelist who, through a long series of events, ends up back at his therapist’s office. After an unsuccessful interaction on the couch, he walks out into the waiting room, looks around, and then delivers the line that gave the movie its name. “What if this is as go

I asked Marcos what he’d discovered; and he said, essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural

What’s indisputable is that when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions.