Making Happy Memories Often Involves Firsts
The Daily Stoic Podcast’s Ryan Holiday featured Chip Conley, an author, hotelier and “man on a mission” according to Conley’s website. That mission is to rebrand midlife or as one of his venture’s website writes, “Midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s a calling.”
They discussed a lot of things, but one was how new experiences enrich your life and an enriched life is often a happier life.
Conley said,
“Part of the reason that younger people feel like life moves slowly for them during the summer is because they have so many new activities. So, the freshness of first time experiences tends to actually prolong time. It’s when we don’t have fresh new experiences that life starts to feel like it’s accelerating…We’ve gotten really better at the ‘how do we live a longer life?’thing, but ‘how do we live a deeper life?’ — that [entails] trying new things.”
This coincides well with Meik Wiking’s work. Wiking thinks that our brains are wired to remember first-time experiences. Most of us (but not all) remember our childhood really well or time periods when we have a lot of firsts happening. For many people that’s between 15 and 30.
Over on ideas.ted Wiking writes,
“You can also see the reminiscence effect in some autobiographies, where adolescence and early adulthood are described over a disproportionate number of pages. If you look at Agatha Christie’s autobiography, which is 544 pages long, the death of her mother happens on page 346, when Christie was 33. In the period that covers the reminiscence bump in her life, memories fill more than 10 pages per year. In contrast, she sums up the events of 1945 to 1965, when she was aged between 55 and 75, in just 23 pages — a little over one page per year.“
That bit was a weird wake-up call for me. What if I’m not making new memories that are happy? What if I’m not enriching my life any more? What am I not doing any more? What firsts are not happening? How do I make them happen?
Wiking continues,
“When we’re in our teens, there are a lot of firsts, while firsts at age 50 are rarer. This is also why studies find that people who immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country to the US have their reminiscence bump at different times, depending on how old they were at the time of the move. Temporal landmarks of firsts and changes of scene play an important role in organizing autobiographical memory. There is a before and an after.
“If we want life to slow down, to make moments memorable and our lives unforgettable, we may want to remember to harness the power of firsts. In our daily routines, it’s also an idea to consider how we can turn the ordinary into something more extraordinary in order to stretch the river of time. It may be little things. If you always eat in front of the television, it might make the day feel a little more extraordinary if you gather for a family dinner around a candlelit table—and if you are always eating candlelit dinners, it might be nice to eat dinner during a movie marathon.”
There’s a beauty in there. As we age, we hopefully love ourselves more, give ourselves more grace, but there’s also the potential to get in a funk (that potential exists at all ages really, we just label the mid-life one as a crisis). Exploring, deliberating making memories, purposefully having firsts is a really great way to live a happier enriched life.
Wiking has created an entire book about making memories. Conley has a whole book about the ways you can love being in mid-life. Making happy memories, Wiking says, can be a purposeful act. How cool is that?