You Judge Experiences by Their Peak and Their Ending, Not the Average

A two-week vacation with one terrible, chaotic final day is often remembered as "the trip that went wrong" — even though thirteen of the fourteen days were wonderful. Memory doesn't average an experience; it remembers the peak moment and the last moment, and largely ignores everything else. This is why a great relationship's painful ending can overshadow years of genuine happiness in how you recall it later.

Knowing this changes how you handle endings — a hard conversation, a project's final week, a trip's last day. The ending carries disproportionate weight in memory, so it's worth the extra effort to close things well, even when the rest went fine on its own.