How the Ending Decides Your Impression of the Whole - Using the Peak-End Rule in Daily Life

The Ending Stays, Not the Length

Of a four-day trip, three days were clear and enjoyable. On the final day it rained, the train was delayed, and you got home exhausted. Recall that trip a few months later and it is somehow filed as a difficult trip.

In terms of the actual distribution of time, the good hours were overwhelmingly longer. Even so, within memory the last few hours set the color of the whole thing.

This bias comes from the property that memory does not store experience as an average. The tendency for the ending and the peak to decide the verdict on the whole goes by the name Peak-End Rule, and it is usable once you know it.

The Self Experiencing and the Self Remembering

What to distinguish here are two positions.

One is the position of experiencing the present moment. Pleasure and displeasure both accumulate in proportion to the length of time. Three days of clear weather is three days worth of pleasure.

The other is the position of remembering afterward. This one does not handle length of time. It builds an assessment of the whole from the most vivid parts and the ending.

These two positions issue different assessments of the same events. A long stretch of calm time is high in value from the experiencing position and leaves almost nothing from the remembering position.

And what we use as material for our choices is usually the latter. Deciding where to travel next, you consult the memory of the previous trip. If memory is weighted toward the ending, so are your choices.

Where to Put the Last Day of a Trip

Bearing this property in mind changes how you build an itinerary.

When laying out a trip, most people gather the major plans into the first half. Do the big sightseeing while you still have energy, then run down the second half. From the standpoint of memory, however, this distribution loses out.

Reverse it and the impression changes. Put something pleasant, even if brief, on the final day. Eat at the place you wanted to try, spend time somewhere quiet, travel with time to spare. The single decision not to treat the last day as filler changes the memory that follows.

The design of the journey home matters too. If the return leg is long and tiring, that tiredness becomes the final memory. Spending a little more to make the way back easier is reasonable when viewed as an investment in memory.

That said, do not sacrifice the experiencing position. Enduring the stay in order to improve the memory has the order backward. Keeping the quality of the long stretch while adding a little care at the end is the practical shape.

How to Close a Meeting

The same property operates in encounters between people.

Consider a one-hour review with hard criticism in the middle and a forward-looking close, versus the same review ending on the criticism. Even with an identical amount of content, the impression the other person carries away differs a great deal.

This is not a matter of manipulation but of care taken so that what you want to convey actually gets through. End on something negative and only that part remains, and the rest of the content fails to land.

In practical terms, reserve a few minutes for the close. What was confirmed, what happens next, what you are counting on. Brief is fine. Skip that time and run out the clock instead, and the content does not take hold.

The same goes for meetings: a meeting that overruns and ends with everyone worn out leaves fatigue in memory rather than what was decided. Finishing five minutes early and placing a close there increases what stays with the participants.

What Remains From a Parting

The property operates in far weightier situations too.

When a long relationship ends, the final exchanges can decide the memory of the whole. There were years of time, and yet only the arguments of the last few weeks remain.

Knowing this structure shows you what it means to choose an ending. Even after deciding not to continue a relationship, you can still choose how to end it.

And that is not only for the other person. It is the work of deciding how you yourself will remember that relationship. If there was good time in it, erasing that with a final impression is a loss.

The same is said of accompanying someone at the end of life and of caregiving. Even with a long period of involvement, the memory of the final stretch stays strongly. That is why the choice to devote time to the closing period has meaning when viewed in hindsight.

Should Improving the Memory Be the Goal?

Having written all this, a question remains. Is designing experience for the sake of memory really desirable?

Think through the extreme form and the problem becomes visible. Improving the ending even at the cost of the quality of the experience, choosing actions by whether they will be remembered, valuing only the scenes that end up in photographs. Head in this direction and the time you are living gets demoted to raw material for memory.

There are also observations that concentrating on recording thins out the experience. The effect that taking photographs has on memory addresses exactly this problem.

So the use of this needs a line drawn. Secure the quality of the experience for the sake of the experience, and confine the care for memory to the closing stretch. And hold as a premise that time which leaves no memory also has value.

A long stretch of calm time disappears from the remembering position. But from the experiencing position it was certainly there. There is no need to lower its value because it disappears. Considering the mechanism by which the sense of time changes with age, it becomes clear that the amount that stays in memory and the amount of time you lived are separate things. Attending to the ending is not for discarding the latter but for tidying the former a little.