You Can Still Make 2020 a Great Year
By: Smillew Rahcuef
Tags: New Year, Self Improvement, New Years Resolutions, Inspiration, Life

You Can Still Make 2020 a Great Year

Me and my brother reflecting on 2020 by Sepp Rutz on Unsplash

I see all the articles about 2021, and I’m like: “Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute!”

It’s not time to wrap up 2020, nor to close it or look back.

2020 is still alive!

And with less than ten days left, it’s more than urgent to make the best out of it.

So far, most of us would say the year was so-so. Sure, you might have a point. But as Robert Pattinson said in the movie Tenet, “what’s happened, happened.”

Science is there to help us. It won’t change the experience much, but the memories will be diametrically different. And in a few months (even weeks) from now, memories will be all that counts.

Daniel Kahneman is our savior!

In his book, Thinking fast and slow, or in his Ted Talk (an excellent first approach), Kahneman tells us the difference between the experiencing and remembering self.

When looking back on our life, the remembering self is the only one that matters. Indeed, the experiencing self is only aware of what’s happening now. The experiencing self is a professional mindfulness practitioner, living fully in the present moment.

At 11:59:59 PM on December 31st, the experiencing self will say goodbye to 2020 and enter 2021. The remembering self, however, will only start processing the year 2020. What it will make of it will depend on two things.

Two things that are crucial to remember when trying to maximize the happiness of the remembering self:

its blindness to the duration

and the peak/end rule.

Duration doesn’t count

The remembering self is blind to time. The experience can last for one week or two months. If it’s the same thing, it won’t make a difference in the long term.

A typical example is staying in a fabulous place for the holidays. The first week is great, the second week is also great but the same. Your experiencing self is delighted all along, but your remembering self won’t be able to tell the difference between the two.

Four years ago, I had my leg in a cast for six weeks. It could have been four times more or twice less; it wouldn’t make a difference from today’s perspective. Of course, my experiencing self would have thought about it differently. But with time, it doesn’t have a say anymore.

Peak/end rule

What the remembering self focuses on is the peak of the experience and the end of it. Again, no matter how much time the whole thing lasts.

You might not have much control over the peak, but the end can usually be twisted in your favor. I guess that the twisting is possible as long as the peak remains reasonable. Dramatic events just can’t be turned into positive ones. In all other cases, it’s of pivotal importance to make the end as positive as possible.

I think this is true for any situation in life. Unfortunately, the best example that comes to my mind is the end of a relationship. Ending it on a bad note somehow discredits all that happened before. You might have been ten years with someone, out of which eight were fantastic; all is left is resentment.

I learned this the hard way earlier on and paid attention to staying as positive as possible when divorcing my partner five years ago. It worked. We’re still talking to each other!

But let us come back to the holiday’s example from above. Imagine the shower breaks down, and you can’t use it for two days. If it happens at the end of the first week and is corrected for the second one, the memory will be much better than if the reverse was to happen.

In the former, you’ll keep in mind the second week was better than the first one. In the latter, even though the place and everything else was fantastic, what you’ll remember is the broken shower during the last two days. You’ll end on a bitter note.

Interestingly enough, if the owner were to apologize on the last day and give you a 50% discount on your next stay because of the shower, the end would be positive again and the memory as well. I dare say the memory will be even better than in the absence of shower problems.