Hey there,

Are you excited for the holiday season?

Here’s what I have for your this week:

• One big thing. It’s vacation season. What matters more: the vacation itself or the memory of it?

• You have to check this out. A TED Talk on the two selves, plus insights on why you are under-utilizing the AI robots. 🤖🤖

• Tools & Tech. Get your 2025 calendars and planners.

I hope you like this one.

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Two selves on vacation.

Let’s talk about vacations.

Maybe you have one coming soon during this holiday season, or perhaps you are already planning one for next summer.

Let's see if I can use a dash of magic to make your trip more memorable. You in? 🪄

Let’s start with a thought experiment about a trip you might take next summer.

Let’s make it stellar. You’ll be in Kawaii with some of your favorite people. You’ll relax by a gorgeous oceanside pool. You’ll hike through verdant forests to reach a glimmering peak, feeling accomplished. Through lively dinners with friends, you’ll feel a deep sense of connection.

And then… the moment you arrive home, your trip's pictures and videos (and their interweb footprints) will be comprehensively destroyed. Then, you will swallow a powerful pill that wipes out all your memories of the trip.

Knowing these conditions in advance, would you plan the details of the vacation differently? Do they change how much you would be willing to pay for the trip relative to a normally memorable vacation? Would you still pay extra for that upgrade to the Pineapple Suite?

Do you still want to go at all?

We can remember it for you wholesale.

The above amnesic vacation scenario is the inverse of the idea at the heart of the 1966 story by Phillip K. Dick called We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (that link is a PDF of the complete novelette), which was the inspiration for the movie Total Recall (1990 and 2012 versions).

In this scenario, the main character, Douglas Quail, pays an agency to implant complete memories of an adventurous journey to Mars. For the agency fee, he gets detailed memories plus evidence of the trip, including postcards and souvenirs.

Here are some snippets from the story:

Quail seated himself, feeling tense. "I'm not so sure this is worth the fee," he said. "It costs a lot and as far as I can see I really get nothing." Costs almost as much as going, he thought.

"You get tangible proof of your trip," McClane disagreed emphatically. "All the proof you'll need. Ticket stub. It proves you went--and returned. Postcards. And passport, certificates listing the shots you received. And more." He glanced up keenly at Quail. "You'll know you went, all right," he said.

"Is an extra-factual memory that convincing?" Quail asked.

"More than the real thing, sir. Had you really gone to Mars as an Interplan agent, you would by now have forgotten a great deal; our analysis of true-mem systems--authentic recollections of significant events in a person's life--shows that a variety of details are very quickly lost to the person. Forever. Part of the package we offer you is such deep implantation of recall that nothing is forgotten.

I saw the Arnold Schwarzenegger version of Total Recall in a theater in Miami in 1990. I thought it was so cool. And this philosophical question stuck with me for decades:

Is the actual experience of a vacation essential, or is the memory of it all that ultimately matters?

Two selves: living, and thinking about it.

Like many science fiction stories, the Phillip K. Dick novelette proved prescient.

Imagine your closest friend taking a three-day trip to the mountains. Throughout her time away, she sends you regular text messages about how amazing the scenery is, how perfect the rental cabin is, and how she’s been truly decompressing and connecting with nature. The day after she returns, you call to learn more about the trip.

“On the way home, I was rear-ended by another car. I think the car is totaled,” she reports.

“It ruined the whole experience.”

But it didn’t ruin her experience of the trip at all; it only ruined her overall recollection and judgment of the trip, which was ruined by a bad ending.

Through extensive research in the 1990s and 2000s, Daniel Kahneman (the Nobel-prize-winning psychologist often called the "grandfather of behavioral economics") established the idea that we all have two selves: an experiencing self and a remembering self.

The experiencing self lives in the present and only knows the present. It is the experiencing self that the doctor asks, “Does it hurt when I push here?”.

The remembering self keeps score and maintains records. It is the remembering self that the doctor asks, "How have you been feeling?".

Life is a series of snapshots.

We live our lives in continuous, present-tense moments.

Experts say the “psychological present” is about three seconds long. So, we live in a series of three-second snapshots. Our senses take in information. Our brains process ideas and actions automatically and purposefully. We laugh, eat, and stare blankly. In a year, over 10 million such "present" moments exist.

Most of these moments are entirely ignored by the remembering self.

“Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self,” Kahneman explains.

Something tells me Kahneman would have paid for the Total Recall memory implants. Remember the sales agent for the Mars trip memory pill said, “Our analysis of true-mem systems--authentic recollections of significant events in a person's life--shows that a variety of details are very quickly lost to the person. Forever.” Science fiction knows what’s up.

But which of the moments in time you experience—which snapshots—are actually stored by the remembering self? And how reliable is this file storage system?

Research from Kahneman and others established a few answers to these questions.

The peak-end rule.

The first is known as the peak-end rule. This rule states that memory formation is heavily weighted by the most emotionally intense moments (the peak) and the final moments of an experience (the end). These become memorable moments.

An extension of this idea is that experiences with few notable peaks and no clear ending are less memorable. “Studies show we remember moments of intense pleasure, even if those moments are sparse, more fondly than experiences where we are mildly comfortable throughout,” says Nir Eral.

Duration neglect.

A second characteristic of the remembering self is referred to as duration neglect. How long experiences last (their duration) does not affect how the remembering self compiles or scores experiences.

The remembering self is a storyteller.

If your vacation is experienced as a series of snapshots—or perhaps short videos, each three seconds long—then think of memory formation as picking and choosing a handful of your favorites for long-term storage. The peak moments and endings will certainly be part of these memorable moments.

Once selected, the snapshots are organized into a narrative framework—a story.

Stories bind snapshots together in a logical way, making them easier to remember and more straightforward to relive and recount to others. (This is also part of why memories are so unreliable and subject to corruption, but that is a topic for another day.)

Our friends in the neuroscience department have even used brain scans to show how the coding of memories is enhanced when separate events are part of an overarching narrative (the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller).

How to create more memorable moments.

Are you already considering ways to use these findings to improve your next vacation?

Here are a few ideas:

Invest in one or two peak experiences per trip. One or two truly standout experiences will pay more dividends than maximizing every moment of your journey with ho-hum activities.

Don’t forget, your remembering self prizes peak experiences because they are emotionally intense. So, find something that deeply moves you, thrills you, or impacts you—not necessarily something that costs you the most. As we learned in my newsletter on happiness, enjoyment is amplified when experiences happen with other people (that you like, haha).

Craft a memorable ending. I often get the vacation edition of the Sunday scaries. Lamenting the end of a long-anticipated trip would put a frustrating damper on the final 10-20% of the journey. As you now know, the end of a trip has an outsized impact on our memories of the trip as a whole. So what can you do?

Plan something specific for your final day (or final evening). Don’t pack all the things you put off into one chaotic day. Don’t make it the night you eat all the leftovers in the Airbnb fridge. Do something special. Treat it like the ceremonial ending of an incredible journey. Give a toast and reflect on all you did.

Here is my favorite aspect of the peak-end rule: the “end” of something can be shifted. Many vacations end with middle seats or endless traffic. But you can consciously extend “the vacation” to craft a positive moment of closure. Schedule something emotionally resonant to mark your return. Imagine an ancient welcome party welcoming the hero home from her epic adventure.

Leave an nice bottle of champagne in the fridge at home to celebrate your return. Plan a dinner the next night to share photos, memories, and gratitude. Curate your best photos and videos together as a shared activity.

Your remembering self will thank you. You will create more memorable moments.

And when you take stock of how satisfied you are with your life, the memories compiled by the remembering self (with all of its quirks) will inform your answer.

Go make memories.

That’s it for today.

Happy holidays,