In a TED talk, Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural economist and Nobel laureate, narrates a story about a man who was listening to a recording of a symphony, and the sound of it was sublime. But towards the end, in the last couple of minutes, there was a distortion that produced a horrible screeching sound. The man, quite upset, complained that it had ruined the whole thing.
But it had not ruined the experience of listening, for a majority of the moments spent listening were genuinely enjoyable.
It had ruined the memory of listening.
Kahneman posits that we have two selves: an experiencing self that lives in the present, and a remembering self, a story teller who weaves experiences together into a narrative.
While both are crucial, the kind of happiness the two selves feel is very different. The happiness of the experiencing self depends on the quality of the experienced moment; and if I connect this to what I have spoken earlier, it is tied to the degree of wonder in the experienced moment. The happiness of the remembering self depends on the structure of the story it writes, and a lot depends on how the story ends. If the narrative contains an experience of unavoidable pain close to the end, the story is read as unhappy. Another narrative may contain a greater quantum of pain, but if that pain lies in the first half and the story ends without pain, then it is more likely to be read as happy.