Memories of any past experience are judged almost entirely by their most intense moment and how they finished, a mental filtering process identified as the peak-end rule; rather…

A closer look

Memories of any past experience are judged almost entirely by their most intense moment and how they finished, a mental filtering process identified as the peak-end rule; rather than calculating an average of your overall happiness during an event, your lazy brain completely ignores the vast majority of the timeline, so you can have a miserable, painfully stressful two-week vacation, but if you eat one phenomenal slice of pizza on the final day before flying home, your memory will rewrite the entire trip as a massive success, operating as a fantastic evolutionary cheat code that allows us to survive incredibly tedious tasks as long as we make sure to aggressively bribe ourselves with a small piece of chocolate at the very end