Have you ever noticed how a 6-hour flight delay makes you furious in the moment, but a week after the trip you don’t even remember it, let alone feel angry about it? That’s because there’s a difference between how you feel while something is happening and how you remember it later. Psychologists call it the Experience versus the Memory of the Experience. The experience is every second you actually live through. The memory is the story your brain saves afterwards. It mostly keeps the most intense moments and the way things ended, and lets the long, ordinary stretches fade out. Think about all the times you’ve been stuck waiting. An hour at the hospital for an appointment that was supposed to start on time, a 2-hour traffic jam where you were cursing the whole city, a bank queue that just wouldn’t move. In that moment you’re restless, irritated, and fuming. But how many of those do you actually remember today? How many have you ever narrated to anyone? It works the other way too. A skydive has barely a minute of freefall, yet people remember it for the rest of their lives. A relaxed 5-hour evening with friends probably had more total happiness in it (area under the curve), but we never look back on it with the same intensity as that one minute in the air. Memory remembers the peaks. And memories also keep changing every time we recall them. Getting caught bunking in college or getting detained for low attendance felt genuinely scary back then, with parents being informed and you being suspended. Today it’s the story everyone tells proudly at reunions, laughing about what those days were like. This is also why parenting never adds up on paper. Raising a kid means years of broken sleep, 3 am feeds, tantrums in the middle of a mall, homework battles every evening, school fee stress, college applications, and teenage mood swings. Weekends, holidays, and plans all revolve around them for the better part of two decades. Yet ask almost any parent if it was worth it and they'll say yes instantly. That's because their memory isn't a sum of all those tiring days; it's built around the peaks. The first smile, the first wobbly steps, the first time they say mama/papa, the school annual day performance, the call saying they got the job, the graduation, the wedding. These moments are so intense that they end up defining the whole experience, while the years of exhaustion slowly fade into the background. The experience may be mostly hard, but the memory of it is made of peaks, and that's what you recall.