A couple of days ago I listened to a podcast about the
human memory, the guest Daniel Kahneman a
psychologist who has a Nobel prize in Economics
stressed the importance of endings in man’s ability to
remember events. We remember an event as
awesome if it has a happy ending, ignoring the
shortcomings that may have preceded the happy
ending while an event with a tragic ending leaves a
sad memory even though interesting events may have
preceded the tragic ending.
The guest talked about how he and his wife had gone
on a holiday to celebrate their wedding anniversary 
— the last day of their holiday was really interesting
so they decided to end it albeit they had one more
day left according to plan. The reason he explains has
to do with the memories — they had no idea what the
next day was going to be like and didn’t want to take
risks with memories they’ll live with for many
year’s. They wanted a happy ending.
Humans love and crave happy endings and it shows
in books and movies we love — I remember having
conversations about movies with tragic endings with
friends and we all concluding they didn’t end well.
Most stories we read growing up ended with
sentences like “and they lived happily together ever
after” but are happy endings real? Do we live happily
ever after? Albeit we have different tastes in
happiness — things that interest me may positively
influence my happiness and have no influence on
yours — we have similar if not the same tastes in
sadness. Failure, losing loved ones, poverty, becoming
dependent on other adults when we become much
older, death and a host of other things most of which
are inevitable in life especially close to the end of our
lives. Losing loved ones are inevitable occurrences no
thanks not to death only but distance and other
things that separate loved ones. We complain about
how cruel the world is but never consider death as an
option because we fear it; we hardly even want to talk
about it till we are much older when it becomes
imminent. Some people request to be euthanized
because they are in pain that is beyond their control,
so they see death as the only way out, that’s a sad
ending although they may have been successful all
their life and spent every day happy. The thought
about those happy times has no influence on their
decisions, the pain they feel does — this is also the
case of those who commit suicide, many times we
hear about public figures who we expect to be happy
committing suicide.
The mistake we humans make is we expect happy
endings to occur naturally, forgetting that life isn’t set
up that way — instead we should learn from the guest
on the podcast, force happy endings ourselves and
cherish good times we have with loved ones.