Discover how the cognitive bias of the peak-end rule influences you to make terrible life choices, and how you can use it to your advantage.

Use this simple psychology rule to improve your customers’ experience.

Happiness: it’s all about the ending.

WOUNDS

When I told you to look out for the peak-end scene I imagined with the capitalist, I was thinking about reading, and love of reading, and of the sword that leaves a scar when reading draws us in and then, unceremoniously, kicks us out. With a pronoun, a slur, or some other reminder of the text’s ambient, violent ground.

What I may have been thinking was that in the most extreme cases of this phenomenon, our recollection of a beloved text reduces into two ends of a continuum—reduces, that is, to the highest point of pleasure and identity with it, and to the lowest point, the gutkick of exclusion. (The end.)

This may explain the blur of partial recall—love plus rage plus shame.

This may be the point of kicking open the door.

But S has begun to challenge me on exactly this point. I wasn’t able to recognize it at first; my defenses were triggered, and for a time, weeks maybe, they worked. But defenses wear down and eventually crack, revealing vulnerabilities (this is, from a different angle, a description of the phenomenon described by the sword/ scar/blur).

It began—the challenge—after I sent my notes following receipt of the paragraph S had copied from G., in which I described the experience triggered by my rereading of Pascal. What S challenged was the value of doing so in the first place. What S challenged was the value even of giving thought to, spending the energy of analysis on, this experience—which, from my description of it, registered mostly as discomfort—at all.

Is it possible that S feels about me the way I feel about the capitalist? If true, is it possible S may have a point?

I had these thoughts during a shift at the café-bar. It was even slower than usual, and I’d taken out my laptop, which sat closed on the counter.

I felt something like love for S, and S felt something for me—this I knew, I sensed, without doubt. I was suddenly sleepy, fatigued by this wondering, blasted by a sharp new ray of sun through the glass door. A sentence arrived as I let my eyes drop shut: Is it possible to love someone who doesn’t share your wounds, someone whose wounds are so different from your own?

It so happened that the day of the train fantasy and the arrival at the peak-end rule was also a day in which, just before dinner and after my journey was complete, a video call was scheduled between me and the capitalist and our other colleagues, those of us who participated in the online scheduling poll.