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past experiences by condensing them to their salient elements, which tend to be whatever was best or worst about the experience, and whatever happened first and last.35 This significantly influences how people make choices, since their choices about the future are inevitably based on their poor memories of past choices. If they do not accurately remember how they felt in the past, then their choices will lead to poor results even by their own assessment. (One of my favorite movies is Memento, about a man searching for his wife’s murderer. His problem is that in the same attack that killed his wife, he suffered a head injury that makes it impossible for him to form new memories. The movie is told backward, to put the viewer in the same position of not knowing what just happened. Even if our usual memory problems aren’t this extreme, we can relate.)36

The most colorful example of this difficulty comes from a study of patients undergoing colonoscopies.37 Back when this was not done with anesthesia, the procedure was painful, particularly when the physician manipulated the probe. In the study, the doctors removed the probe from some patients as soon as the procedure was done. For other patients, the doctor would leave the probe motionless inside the colon for twenty additional seconds. While painful, these last twenty seconds were less painful than the earlier part of the procedure. This latter group of patients thus endured more total time with a probe inside their colon, and the total amount of pain they suffered was greater than the first group by any objective measure. But they remembered less discomfort than the first group, influenced less by the aggregate amount of discomfort than by what they felt during the last twenty seconds. This is more than just an esoteric point from medical research. Those who remembered less discomfort were more willing to return for annual screenings.

Similar defects in our abilities to remember our experiences accurately can explain why women who go through childbirth remember it being less painful than it actually was, and why people who end their marriages remember them as worse than they actually were.38

Our predictions about the future are even worse. As psychologist Daniel Gilbert tells us, “When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.”39

The disconnect between the present and future is sometimes caused by our inability to predict our own preferences, usually because when we make predictions we think about the future, but when the time comes to put our preferences into action we’re making judgments about the now. One example of this is a study that asked people at a conference to establish their preferences for snacks over several days, picking one kind of snack per day. When asked for such a prediction, they anticipated that they would want variety, so they ordered a variety of snacks. When the time came to eat every day, however, the attendees were offered the full panoply of snacks. Did people eat a variety of snacks? No. They selected their favorite every day. The future had become now, and in the present they wanted their favorite.40

I have started to use this insight in my grocery shopping. I used to buy a variety of frozen dinners to heat up and eat when I was eating alone and there was no time for a home-cooked meal. Usually, I would eat my favorite one—chicken parmesan and pasta—within a couple of days of bringing it home. The next time I opened the freezer, I was inevitably disappointed that my favorite was already gone. Sometimes I would just eat cereal. After I started buying only chicken parm I was much happier when I opened the freezer door. In the future I may have wanted variety, but in the now I want chicken parm.

8.

Here’s the point to all of this. We don’t have to be Raelyn Balfour or Charles Whitman to be led