All that ends well was worse before.

2026 Day 189. #PersonalDays.

One of my favourite phrases was

The days are long, but the months short.

Seems very straightforward, and I thought I understood it well until I got to read the Two Selves theory.

In the final section of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman talks about the presence of the remembering self and the experiencing self. They have different tasks and give different value to the same experience that we live through.

The Experiencing Self helps translate current situations into a good or a bad experience. Going through a hardship and feeling really anxious are the effects of your experiencing self. It is absorbing what is good or bad in the short term and then using this information to guide your further decisions.

The Remembering Self decides on what was a memorable experience. It often does not remember the entire incident, but instead focusses on the summary of the whole event. It is this summary that creates a bias and can affect your idea of a past experience or event.

How does the bias affect it?

According to research the mind can be extremely biased towards the end of the events in determining the whole experience.

If the experience ended relatively nicer than it had been throughout, you are more likely to think of it positively. While it cannot affect the even as you are experiencing it, it changes only the memories that you receive when you try to recall it.

A simple example is waiting for your friend to show up. You must wait in the heat for them, which can be extremely annoying. However once they show up, your mood is lifted, you are saved from the heat, and you are ready to have fun. A sincere short apology is just the cherry on top. All of your frustration suddenly goes away because

• your experiencing self is enjoying the change of environment and the newly arrived company
• your remembering self will consider the entire event, the time you spent waiting and the time you spent with your friend and then evaluate your day.

It will most likely forget about the little inconvenience of waiting or barely take it into account when evaluating how your day was.

The bias is not effective all the time.

Some experiences just simply do not end.

We take the above example and change it slightly. While waiting in the heat, we had a sudden rain. Now our clothes are wet, and our wet socks and shoes are constantly bothering us.

We blame our friend for this inconvenience for had they arrived earlier we would have been saved. Now our problem just simply does not end. We are being constantly bothered by damp clothes and socks which is extremely distracting from any joy we must have felt during the meet.

With this change, there might be a complete flip in how you remember the day. Your experience suddenly moves from above average to extremely annoying with only little bouts of fun. If your day ends with the damp clothes still on, you are more likely to assign it to be rougher day than if your clothes dried half way through.

How do we use this theory to help ourselves?

Every day is not the same. Some days we struggle more than others. Over the period of a month however, we average the ups and downs to a pretty normal life.

So each day in its individual self can be long or short, because we often have a point of reference that we compare it with. Months on the other hand are such longer periods of time and so much has happened that we do not judge them very nicely.

Thus in our comparisons we are not going over each day and taking the average of the month but instead focussing on the highlights and how felt towards the end. Were we looking forward to the end in the wait of something more exciting or did we not want it to end because we were having the time of our lives?

Either way, we must use the theory to our advantage.

• Every night before bed, have an engaging conversation. Do something that makes you extremely happy. Something that takes your mind off the day and how happy you are in the current moment. The better you go off to sleep, the happier you will wake up and enjoy yourself.
• Take breaks often, and more so near the end of phases. Fill the end of your week/month with more activities that remind of you happiness. It might seem inconsequential in the moment, but when you look back, your remembering self will tend to focus on the end and thus, have a happier recollection, even better than the average.

A happier past will help you become a happier self. This will also give you the calmness in the moment to do better and be optimistic about the future. A good end can overcome a bad start, not because it will change the result, but the recollection of the same time.

See you tomorrow.