"We have two 'selves.' The experiencing self and the remembered self. In the midst of vacation stresses..."

"... we may be stressed and annoyed by family and children and the indignities of bureaucratic travel, but the remembered self easily turns nausea into nostalgia.... We tend to think of these kinds of experiences on the pleasure/pain level, but really, giving a child the gift of a vacation is more on the meaning/moral plane."

Said Harvard psychiatrist Omar Sultan Haque, quoted in "How Your Brain Morphs Stressful Family Vacations Into Pleasant Memories/There may be a lot of bickering, but your memory creates a nostalgia-inducing highlight reel that makes you want to plan the next trip" (NYT).

ADDED: I was drawn to blog this article because of the "2 selves" idea, which appeared in a post 2 days ago. There, the 2 selves were not the experiencing self and the remembered self (that is, the self at 2 different points in time), but the observer self and the acting-in-the-world self (that is, the social, outward self existing at the same time as the self observing itself).

In the situation where you are acting/perceiving at the same time, you might want to get the 2 selves to feel more unified, because you might want to feel/be more genuine and directly expressive or because you're too inhibited and not getting enough of what you want or stopping other people from hurting you.

When the 2 selves are in different points in time, merging the two isn't possible, but you might want to be more conscious of the difference between the two so you can endure the present. And you might choose to do difficult or unpleasant things because it will benefit the future you to have this experience in the past. So, to focus on travel, you might think it's a lot of trouble and you don't know if the good will outweigh the bad, but you'll be making a distinct memory, because you're seeing and doing some new things. Of course, if you travel, you'll be spending some time planning and getting to the place, and that probably won't be a significant memory (and there's potential for a very bad memory, since you could have an accident). So maybe you come out of 10 days of planning and traveling with 5 days of relatively unusual experiences that, from the point of view of the future, will be memories of some substance that benefit Future You.

And yet, if you don't travel, you do something with your time, and that too might benefit Future You, and it will be 10 full days, none spent on the hassles of planning and getting there, and perhaps all of it will be more pleasurable and rewarding than the experience of being in the traveled-to place.

To get back to the article, the fact that Future You will look back on travel days and see them in the golden light of memory doesn't mean you should travel. It's just a perspective on travel, that you probably won't remember the unpleasantness. But you'll still have the unpleasantness. And the Future You who will be doing the remembering will also remember the things you did on days when you did not travel, and those things too will be seen in the golden light of memory.

Finally, you have to factor in the possibility that something terrible will happen, beyond the power of the filter of memory to correct, and I do think that traveling increases the likelihood of a terrible thing happening and that terrible things are worse when they happen away from home. The terrible things I'm thinking of are getting physically injured, medical problems, being a crime victim, getting accused of a crime, and having relationship trouble.