I went to Glastonbury this year with my family back in June. That extraordinary month when I travelled in Germany to the Euros and then to Glastonbury with the family, and I look back on it now with enormous nostalgia, joy, pride, and happiness at what we saw, what we achieved, and who we were.
But the truth is, it wasn't quite like that at the time, and in a conversation with Andy at work about his recent holiday, we agreed that the peak-end rule is a thing.
As I've explained here many times before, Daniel Kahneman defined the peak-end rule and wrote about it in Thinking, Fast and Slow, the wonderful and extraordinary book he wrote to bring this to the public's attention.
Daniel Kahneman is a genius.
He won a Nobel Prize for the peak-end rule.
The peak-end rule is a heuristic (a theory or philosophy). It suggests that our memories are not an average of the entire experience but an average of the peak and the end (Good or bad).
I've written about this many times, but this becomes a reference blog I will refer to many times when I write about this again. I'm rambling.
Let me explain with a detailed anecdote which will tell you how this works.
We travelled to Glastonbury on the Thursday with my great friend and his family, Stuart Reekie.
Stuart has been to Glastonbury on many occasions, and we never had.
We decided to convert our little horsebox (I promise not luxurious or salubrious) into a temporary camper van and have a tent for the kids.
Stuart has a caravan and a tent for his kid.
So, the part of the horsebox, which the horses usually travel in (It smells of horse piss and shit) had a camp bed in it, and we got to Glastonbury on Thursday, set up camp, went to the Thursday evening, and then full effect on Friday.
We had a wonderful time, but it was still difficult with the kids, different needs, different requirements, different moans, different whinges, all of us trying to look after everybody else's needs, Alison and I feeling like we were overparenting again, all of that stuff.
And so, I woke up in the horse box in the camp bed, which I couldn't sleep in very well on Saturday morning, and I turned to Alison and said, "I'm never bringing my kids on holiday again. "That was genuinely how I felt; it was genuinely the low point of the trip.
I thought people were fighting and not getting what they wanted, and we spent this money and time coming here, and it wasn't working.
Fast-forward about 12 hours, and the five of us were arm in arm in front of Coldplay with the lights on our wrists, in one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen, one of the greatest memories my family will probably ever have.
That was the peak.
In the end, we got out of Glastonbury on Monday after having had many wonderful times and some difficult times. The journey home was fine, and now the experience is amazing.
That's how the peak-end rule works.
That's why ladies have a second baby after a difficult delivery.
That's why patients who have sedation at a dental practice think the experience was a lot better than it actually was. You spend five or 10 minutes at the end being kind and nice and dampening down the badness.
The peak-end rule is a thing.
It was a thing for Andy's holiday recently.
Some of the photographs he showed me were extraordinary, but some of the memories he told me were not the best.
In the end, he'll look back on that and say it was brilliant.
In the end, I look back on Glastonbury and say the same.
It's worth remembering this throughout all of your life.
What you're experiencing, right this minute will not be the memory of what you experienced a little while from now.
Blog Post Number - 3921
Leave a comment