We often imagine that the best moments of our lives are supposed to be perfect. And then reality happens. The weather is not quite right. Someone arrives late. The restaurant isn’t as good as expected. You get tired halfway through the day. The group doesn’t get along as well as you imagined. You miss the sunset or take the wrong train. Suddenly, the experience doesn’t feel like the one you had imagined.
But does that really mean it was a bad experience?
I think one of the problems with the way we experience life today is that we expect too much from individual moments. Social media makes this even stronger. We constantly see beautiful beaches, perfect dinners, exciting trips and seemingly effortless happiness. We rarely see the boring journey behind the photograph, the argument before the dinner or the exhaustion after the hike. We see the highlight, not the whole experience.
When we compare our reality with somebody else’s highlights, our reality almost always loses.
This is particularly noticeable when travelling. We can spend weeks imagining a destination, looking at photographs and creating a mental picture of what it will be like. Then we arrive and discover that the famous viewpoint is crowded, the weather is terrible, or we are simply too tired to appreciate it. But perhaps we have misunderstood what makes a good experience in the first place.
Some of my favorite memories are not necessarily the most spectacular ones. Sometimes they are a long conversation, a spontaneous walk, an ordinary evening with the right people, or a moment that happened completely outside the plan. There is something beautiful about imperfect experiences because they feel real.
John Lennon famously wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Sometimes, while we are waiting for the perfect moment, life is already happening in the ordinary ones.
The trip doesn’t have to be perfect. The summer doesn’t have to be perfect. Your friendships, university years or even your life don’t have to look exactly as you imagined them.
Perhaps we should stop trying to make every experience memorable and simply experience it.
Because the opposite of a perfect experience isn’t a bad one.
It is simply a real one.