Living life and looking back at it are two very different things. When we look forward and live, we find joy in the small stuff -- eating a nice meal, having a good conversation with a friend, going for a walk. But when we look back, none of these events strike out as particularly special. What stands out in hindsight are the significant events of life, the ones that decide the course for the near future (and in some cases entire lifetime). We like to view our life as a sequence of phases, with these big events marking the start or end of these phases. This could be the start/end of a relationship, graduating college, change of jobs, promotion, winning some competition, accident etc. If we were to observe the feeling accompanying these events, I doubt that the major events are very different from the ordinary (small) ones.
Does getting your dream job feel 10,000 times more pleasurable than, say, eating a nice meal? Or watching your favourite movie? Do you feel 10,000 times worse when you have a breakup compared to when you can’t go to a party? I doubt. What about 1000 times? What about 100 or 10 times? My guess would be that purely in terms of how feelings are measured (activations in our brain or concentration of neurotransmitters), the smaller values are more true.
In my opinion, bigger moments don’t differ much in the intensity of feeling, rather, they differ in the rate of decay of their intensity. The joy (or sadness) is slightly more intense but substantially more long-lasting.
There’s another characteristic that these big events have -- a power to repaint everything preceding it.
Through our own lives and others, we are well accustomed to how a big achievement feels worth it of all the struggle and sacrifice you have made for it. All the countless days you restrained yourself from small joys, in hindsight, appear appropriate. You can almost imagine yourself happy in those day-to-day sadness, frustrations and tiredness. Such is the power of a big positive event that it will repaint each negative experience in that phase with a brush of positive emotion.
The same is true for major negative events too -- failure, loss, break up etc. Such an event will taint all your positive memories of joy, happiness, and laughter with a stroke of negative emotions. Every time you went out to enjoy an activity preceding the failure would evoke a slight feeling of guilt, shame and self-loathing when you look back now.
Why is this an issue? Because it gives you anxiety, a fear. Negative events are bound to happen, and many times they are beyond our control. The fear is that there is something negative that is going to happen, something big, lurking around the corner and it would steal and repaint the small yet precious memories you are making every day.
I wish it worked the other way around too. I wish a bunch of small events could help alleviate the sadness and grief of a big negative event, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.
Is this fear unfounded? For one can argue that we should live only in the present. Why does it matter how we look back at the past? Isn’t that what everyone and everything (articles/books/movies) say? To live in the present? I beg to differ, for we can try to live in the present, but it doesn’t happen all the time. Life isn’t that engaging to be only lived in the present (how much I wish it were). A significant chunk of life is lived in our head -- and the time we are not engaging in wishful thinking about the future, we are left with thinking about the past. That is what I find scary.
(A particular case of repainting of past is nostalgia, see comic)