people remember the highs and lows, but the main thing they really remember is meaning. In retrospect, fortunately, our minds play games with us, and they reassemble themselves often into something that is pretty close to what we expected. Vacations are doomed to never measure up. “People expect vacations to be wonderful and derive a lot of pleasure from anticipating them,” said Loewenstein, “which is just as well, because the reality is often much less ideal than the images. Or, as Diener put it, “Some vacations are miserable, but lead to great stories.” “The worst experiences often make the best memories,” Loewenstein said. And when it’s over, we regale friends and family with tales of fun and adventure, good and bad. Then reality intervenes: muggy weather, mosquitoes, sunburn, long lines, pesky children. It’s not really important what we do, as long as it fits into that idealized image.” “Different people have radically different images of what the good life is, and for many, when we go on vacation, we are trying to create a life that resembles what we think of as the good life. “I think all of us walk around with an image of the good life,” said APS Fellow George Loewenstein, Carnegie Mellon University. One brief moment ruined the entire vacation in my memory, despite the many fun moments I undoubtedly had prior to the event.” “It was probably 99 percent pleasant moments,” explained Diener, who is at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “but I never want to go back to Cancun again. A hotel employee had climbed onto a seventh-floor ledge from an adjoining room and made his way to the Dieners’.Ĭarol managed to chase the intruder away, but “I remember nothing else about this vacation,” said Ed.ĪPS Fellow Diener, whose research specialty is well-being, used the Cancun story to underscore a key point about vacations: They are seldom the way we remember them.
“They thought we had skipped out without paying and somehow had left the room locked ,” Ed explained. When Carol came from her shower, wearing only a towel wrapped around her hair, she found a stranger standing there. On the final morning of their vacation in Cancun, Mexico, Ed Diener drove his daughter Marissa to the airport while his wife Carol stayed behind in their seventh-floor hotel room to shower and prepare for their own later flight.
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