When one bad comment ruins a perfect day, and why that is
Sunday, 5 April 2026
Kevin Norquay is a senior writer for The Post and Sunday Star-Times.
ESSAY: It had been a good night, right up to the car ride home.
We’d had a pub catch-up with old secondary school mates, 40 years on. There were laughs, stories, shared history, unreliable memories, teachers, with day boys versus boarders jousting.
For a couple of hours, it was about as good as it gets. Then my driver glanced across and said, “You’ve turned out well.”
A pause.
“You were a bit weird at school. We all called you Dorky Norquay.”
It wasn’t delivered with malice. If anything, it had the tone of a fond recollection, and at the time I took it that way.
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To be fair, it wasn’t new information. “Dorky Norquay” had done the rounds before - first in Primer One (five-year-olds), later proudly adopted as witty by rugby league players I wrote about.
But a decade on, that one line has done a remarkable job of turning itself into the most memorable part of the evening. The laughs are hazy, the stories a blur. What remains, crisp, is the car ride home.
When a day otherwise packed with positives contains one note of discord, why is it that you remember, with all the good stuff well-buried?
Are we wired to think the worst? If the weather forecast says it’s going to be sunny on our special day, why do we tend toward “nah, it’ll probably rain”, whereas a poor forecast gets “yeah, knew it, it will definitely rain”.
Maybe I’m the problem, I thought. So I asked my mum was I a worrier as a child.
“I wouldn’t say that,” mum said. “You were quiet and thoughtful, you watched everything, you didn’t say much, or you asked me. You didn’t worry.”
But this all raises the uncomfortable question: are we just bad at happiness?
Why do throw-away lines decades old dictate the mood of an entire event, and echo annoying down the years in a way praise and achievement don’t.
It’s time for psychology, with a few slices of lemon meringue pie from University of Victoria psychology professor Marc Wilson.
“When I teach about happiness, I think of it as a lemon meringue pie,” he says.
“The biggest slice of our pie, about half, is genetic. If your parents were miserable buggers, you’re statistically more likely to tend towards misery yourself.
“A small slice, around a tenth, is influenced by everyday life circumstances.
“The upside is that if you break your leg, it's going to make you temporarily sadder, but you're going to bounce back up towards your genetic happiness setting.
“The downside, though it's one I'd love to experience, would be winning Lotto. Sure, you're going to be temporarily f----- over the moon, but, again, you're going to trend back towards your genetic setting. About a year after a big lottery win, most winners are back to where they were pre-win.”
Which leaves a chunky remaining slice, the 40% we can control. That’s about how we interpret things, whether we accentuate the positive or wallow in the negative.
So for some, expensive petrol becomes action time, an excuse to walk more, while for others it’s just another reason to mutter darkly about the state of the world, Wilson explains.
Then there’s memory. What happened last tends to matter most.
A golf analogy: if you have a superb round for 14 holes, only to finish with a rude bounce here and there, a lipped out putt - you end the day frustrated. “It was all going well then I screwed it, I’m a choking dog loser.”
If the bad luck was early, but you blazed the last 14 holes, then bliss.
In that case the story would be, “I was in trouble early, but I’m proud of how I fought back.” Both rounds ended with the same score, yet are seen in black-and-white contrast.
Wilson points to a couple of quirks in how our brains handle experience.
The first is something called primacy and recency. We tend to remember the start of things, and the end, more vividly than the middle.
The second is the “peak-end rule”: we don’t store events as continuous films, but as a handful of snapshots, disproportionately drawn from the most intense moment (the peak) and the final one (the end).
“Small worries or problems snowball,” he says.
“They become a pattern, and patterns mean you can expect them to continue. Thanks to the peak-end rule, when the wheels fall off they become evidence that the wheels are going to keep falling off, or ‘here we go again [eyeroll]’.”
So the last four holes didn’t just spoil the round, they rewrote it in a misery guts way.
Humans are inclined to dwell on the negative. In the old days that was helpful “here comes a sabre tooth tiger, I’d best run” or “uh, oh Vikings, no good can come from this.”
Lying on your beach towel might be thoroughly pleasant, but if a tsunami is rolling in you likely substitute it with evasive action.
We are, as Wilson puts it, designed to pay more attention to negative information. It’s an evolutionary hangover from a time when missing a threat had consequences.
So even a modern better-informed brain weighs things accordingly. The possibility of losing a job occupies more space than the daily reality of having one. What needs fixing around the house shouts louder than a recently-upgraded kitchen.
Negative things feel bigger not necessarily because they are bigger, but because we’re tuned to notice them, remember them, and string them into patterns.
And patterns matter. A couple of bad holes at the end of a round aren’t just bad holes - they become evidence. “Here we go again.” When the boss says “pop into my office”, few of us think a pay rise is looming, we create a bleak narrative.
The mind, trying to be helpful, joins the dots and draws a line through them for the danger ahead. Boss + me = trouble.
I put my own theory to Wilson: we treat happiness like a bank account. Put enough good things in - a nice afternoon chatting with friends in the sun, a grinning dog playing the fool, a chortling tui in the cabbage trees, and that can outweigh the bad.
Others think this too, there’s a popular idea you need three positive experiences to cancel out one negative one.
Are you with me? Wilson isn’t.
With admirable clarity, he calls my theory “a pile of shit”.
We don’t experience our lives as a neat ledger of deposits and withdrawals. We experience a selectively compressed version, with a bias towards the dramatic and the recent.
Our highlight reel is full of bloopers: instances of when you might have done better, been more supportive, controlled your anger, held your tongue instead of blurting out hurtful nonsense you don’t even believe.
But there is the other 40% of Wilson’s lemon meringue pie to lift the mood - that’s the bit we can influence, the way we interpret things. Ok, so three times you may have been Dorky Norquay, but the other six decades you weren’t.
What primary school children and league players think is of little interest. Mostly, you don’t screw up the last four holes. Most of the emails readers send are positive and thankful, those that aren’t can be analysed and filed.
Worry is a kind of mental rehearsal: the brain is trying to prepare for uncertainty, like putting on a seatbelt before a crash that may never come. It’s useful, in moderation. Exhausting, if a default setting.
When worry wakes you up at 3am, it’s due to your brain needing to solve a problem, action is required. Happiness lets you snooze through - all is well in the world, no input required, sleep comes easily.
And then there are the worries we can’t act on. Distant, abstract ones: Trump, Iran, petrol, flooding, the cost of living, the result of sports matches involving your favourite team.
The trick isn’t to eliminate the inevitable bad moments, but to recognise them as small, unfinished fragments, not the whole story.
Most of the time, the day was good. The golf was good. The company was good.
So don’t let the last thing that happened take all the credit.