Meaningful Returns

Have you ever seen the movie Million Dollar Baby? It won four Oscars, somehow, (including Best Picture) despite it being the worst movie ever. Seriously. The one line plot summary from IMDB is, “A determined woman works with a hardened boxing trainer to become a professional.” What it should say is, “A determined woman works with a hardened boxing trainer to become a professional, and then she dies.” I don’t even care if that’s spoiled the whole movie for you, because you should never watch it anyway. And I’m not saying that every movie has to have a happy ending. I’m just saying if the movie has that bad of an ending, it ought to come with a Surgeon General’s warning or something. I don’t need a movie to tell me the world can be a terrible, terrible place.

But you know it’s interesting, the first three quarters of the movie is pretty good. I don’t know how it won four Oscars, but it was pretty good. It’s just that the last 25% of the movie not only ruined the rest of the movie, but (if you can’t tell) made me legitimately angry. Dan Gilbert talks about this in his book, Stumbling on Happiness. For him, the movie is Schindler’s List–he loves the whole movie until the very end (after the story ends and there’s a part with some of the actual people honoring Schindler), and then he hates the movie. What he’s getting at is the fact that when we look back at a series of events or experiences, “our impression is strongly influenced by its final items.”

There are a number of crazy studies that show how strong this influence is in us, including one where volunteers participated in two trials, putting their hands in a bucket of icy water at 57 degrees Fahrenheit. This would be painful, but not harmful. The first trial lasted sixty seconds and then was done, while the second lasted for ninety seconds, but during the last thirty seconds the water was warmed to a slightly balmier 59 degrees.

Do you know which trial the volunteers said was more painful? THE ONE WHERE THE HANDS WERE IN THE ICE WATER FOR 50% LONGER. And when they were asked which trial they would rather repeat, almost three quarters of the participants chose THE ONE WHERE THE HANDS WERE IN THE ICE WATER FOR 50% LONGER. We are so weird. But that is the way we are: the end matters. The last thirty seconds with slightly less-icy water changed the volunteers’ perception of the entire ninety seconds.

So, all of this is a round about way of coming to my point (and there are many points I could make about this): when you plan a vacation, take care that you aren’t just planning the first few days and leaving the last day or two to chance. Concentrate on the last part. Why? Because the end matters. The whole vacation matters, and it certainly wouldn’t do to be lazy about that part either (like, the movie The Core is actually the worst movie ever, 100% of it is awful, though I wasn’t nearly as mad about it), but the last part will make a stronger impact on your memory than the other parts. Make it worthwhile.