Wherein I accidentally figure out why I'm a pessimist

Reading this unrelated article, the following passage caught my eye.

One reason that paying for experiences gives us longer-lasting happiness is that we can reminisce about them, researchers say. That’s true for even the most middling of experiences. That trip to Rome during which you waited in endless lines, broke your camera and argued with your spouse will typically be airbrushed with “rosy recollection,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Lyubomirsky has a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness. “Trips aren’t all perfect,” she notes, “but we remember them as perfect.”

My first thought was "Oh, so THAT's why people like travelling." Because my brain works the opposite way. I remember every single annoyance. The largest-looming memories of my childhood summers are fighting off carsickness and my sister, yearning for a moment alone in a quiet air-conditioned room with a book. This is why to this day I hate travelling and there are few things I'd rather do on a summer weekend then have some quality time alone with a book.

Then I realized that's it's more than just memories of travelling. In all my memories, the negative emotions stay on as strong as ever, but the positive emotions fade.

I can best explain this with a recent memory. When we saw Eddie the first time, I came home with three concurrent emotions: giddy endorphin rush, the "OMG, he's real!" feeling I got when he first walked on stage, and wanting to kick myself for making such an ass of myself at stage door.

The endorphin rush faded like endorphins do, and never came back as part of the memories. I remember the fact that it happened, of course. I remember what it felt like. But when I go into the memory, the endorphin rush isn't there. Even the next day telling people about it, I didn't feel even a fraction of the endorphin rush when I summoned up the memory.

The "OMG, he's real" feeling was present in the memories at first. It would totally reach into my belly with it's claws and grab my guts and twist them (in an entirely good way). Now, three months later, it's faded to a quiet little smile. I remember having that feeling, I remember what it felt like, but it's no longer an inherent part of the memory. Three months from now, I probably won't even be able to summon it up. (Which is unfortunate - it was an entirely new feeling and I rather like it).

But the feeling of wanting to kick myself for making an ass of myself hasn't gone away or even weakened. Even now when I think of it, I still wince physically and viscerally, and would slap my own face if I wasn't too chickenshit. I've already convinced myself quite logically that my idiocy was inconsequential (with a tremendous assist from someone on a fan site who proudly described doing something far stupider than I'd ever dream of), but the negative emotion is there just as strong as ever.

And I think all my memories work this way. I remember the fact that I felt gleefully independent when I started living alone, but I feel the constant lurking fear of the things that would crawl out of walls in my crappy student housing. I remember that my sister got married last year, but I feel the anger and frustration and humiliation and helplessness of my uncle (bizarrely) giving me a hard time for not being married myself in the one moment where I couldn't escape because the ceremony was right about to start any minute. I remember that I played that one playground game many many times and enjoyed it, but I feel the helpless terror of the one time I got injured and had to go to the ER and didn't understand what was going on, to the extent that I'm flashing back just typing this non-descriptive sentence. Positive emotions fade until I can just remember the fact that I felt the positive emotions, negative emotions stay on as an inherent part of the memory that comes back every time I remember it.

So if most people's brains are wired the opposite, so bad emotions fade and good emotions stay as described in the quote above, that would explain why so many people are so bizarrely optimistic. And, accordingly, why I am so inherently pessimistic.

The next mystery: why does my brain do this differently?