The peak-end rule goes like this.
Say you’re a research volunteer. The researchers ask you to place your hand in a bowl of very cold water for 60 seconds. When the minute’s up, the researchers bring out another bowl of very cold water. You again put your hand in it for 60 seconds. But you’re asked to keep your hand submerged for another 30 seconds, as researchers gradually raise the temperature of the water by a few degrees.
Which trial would you choose to repeat?
Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others found in a 1993 study that a “significant majority chose to repeat the long trial, apparently preferring more pain over less.”
“The results add to other evidence suggesting that duration plays a small role in retrospective evaluations of aversive experiences; such evaluations are often dominated by the discomfort at the worst and at the final moments of episodes.”
In other words: We tend to judge experiences by their peak, and by their end, and by the difference between those two points.
Keep this in mind as we consider why young Americans, across the political spectrum, are intensely dissatisfied with the state of their country.
Zoomers generally aren’t worried about starving to death, or being picked off by a stray tiger, or contracting malaria. By those metrics, we have it pretty good. Really, extraordinarily good, if you compare our material wealth to the material wealth of most people living in most times.
But Zoomers have it worse than their parents, for the most part, and there’s a sense that we’re standing at the beginning of a long and painful decline.
Return to the cold water experiment. Now, the water in the bowl begins growing colder at the minute mark, and your hand is chained to the bottom of the bowl. You might start feeling a little unhappy with “the system.”
Hence the 62% of Zoomers who have a “favorable view” of socialism, and the 34% of Zoomers who say the same of communism, according to a survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov.
“... [I]f one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it,” Palantir and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel warned in a 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg and others.
The turn might be leftwards, as in New York City’s recent mayoral election. The turn might be rightwards, as evidenced by the tiresome thinkpieces on the “online radicalization” of young men.
Thiel writes of a “broken generational compact” between the young and the old.
“... [W]hen one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate[.]”
Why is real estate so expensive? Why do productive young people feel like unwilling ATMs for a state that hates them? And where is our money going?
The answer is hiding in plain sight.