If mementos of personal triumphs are starting to make you feel like a has-been, you might be better off without them.
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From time to time, I visit a friend who has been enormously successful in business. He has an office in New York City that is decorated top to bottom with memorabilia of his many achievements. On the wall are framed magazine covers with his smiling face—CEO of the Year! On the bookshelves are dozens of knickknacks engraved with the dates of when he bought or sold a company.
His office is like a shrine to past glories, and an obvious source of pride. Recently, however, he surprised me by saying he plans to get rid of all of these trophies. I asked why, and he told me that his business has struggled of late, and the trophies are only making his troubles seem worse. “I feel as if they’re mocking me.”
This phenomenon has been called the “Ozymandias problem,” an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem about the once-great ancient-Egyptian pharaoh (also known as Ramesses II), who is memorialized by a long-eroded statue—of which nothing recognizable remains after many millennia except the inscription on its base: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The Ozymandias problem refers to the futility of our efforts to immortalize our accomplishments. The one who would despair, of course, would be the pharaoh himself, were he alive to see his ruined statue.
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Like my friend, almost all of us enjoy commemorating our achievements, but we must also face the inevitable fact that our worldly triumphs will decay with the passage of time. This realization can be a source of bitterness and keep us stuck in the past. Then, as my friend found, our trophies might end up mocking us. But only if we let them. If, instead, we choose to celebrate and remember what truly matters in life, we can enjoy the past and the present, despite what time brings our way.
Your trophies might be a silver cup from winning a pickleball tournament, a Phi Beta Kappa pin, stuffed-and-mounted animals, or pictures of yourself with celebrities. Such awards and mementos might seem like a simple matter, but they’re not. Trophies attempt simultaneously to stop time and to substitute a concrete object for an abstract experience.
Say you win a spelling bee as a kid. The moment of victory is sweet—it stimulates your brain’s ventral striatum, part of the cognitive-reward circuit. But that sweetness is both ephemeral and intangible—a moment marked by your identifying a series of letters more accurately than your competitors. To freeze that feeling of pleasure in time and make it more concrete, you receive a certificate with the inscription Seventh-Grade Spelling Champion, which you have framed and put up on your wall, where it stays for years.
Because we value our victories so highly, we value the associated trophies—even trivial ones—in ways that might seem irrational. Social scientists have demonstrated this trait using clever experiments. For example, in 2014, two German economists administered a simple competitive math test to one group among 76 adults. The winners—those with the highest scores—received a “trophy,” an ordinary pen worth 2.10 euros, and the losers got nothing. They were then asked to name the price for which they would be willing to part with their pens; the average amount was 4.40 euros. Evidently, this plain object was now endowed with some emotional value above and beyond its utility. When the losers were asked how much they would pay for the identical pen, they quoted an average price of 57 cents, suggesting an aversion to someone else’s trophy, which would presumably remind them of their defeat.
Trophies of all types are intended to make us happier by evoking a positive memory. And plenty of research has shown that recalling past happy experiences can improve well-being by lowering stress and reducing feelings of sadness. Not coincidentally, people who are suffering from persistent and intense sadness may struggle to recall positive autobiographical experiences. A good happiness habit is to keep a journal of happy memories, such as fun days with loved ones and moments of peace and tranquility, and then turn to this journal in moments of strife and stress.
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But memorializing extraordinary victories is different from recalling sweet moments in ordinary life. Although the latter are happy times you can reasonably hope to replicate—a reminder that life can be good—the former can set you up for an unhappy comparison with your former self.
Suppose you get fired from your job. This can hurt a lot, and may temporarily make you feel worthless. Thinking of happy times with friends and family can help you at such a moment, reminding you that there are still plenty of people who love and value you. But looking at your framed Employee of the Month award from better times is probably a bad idea.
Trophy-keeping can be an example of what I call “invidious intertemporal autocomparison” (don’t judge me; coming up with fancy technical terms is one way academics get tenure). In one study showing how this syndrome can hurt you, Eastern European researchers asked people to evaluate what their life was like before the fall of Communism compared with their current circumstances. The researchers found that the better people’s past existence seemed to them in retrospect, the lower their well-being would be in the present.
Imagine living with someone who went out of their way to remind you every day that you used to be younger and more attractive, or that you used to have better ideas and more energy. That would be an abusive relationship. But this is in effect what you are doing to yourself if you adorn your home or workplace with trophies of your past accomplishments.
None of this is to suggest that you should enter your very own witness-protection program and erase your whole past. Personal mementos are fine. The problem with conventional trophies is that where your happiness is concerned, they get the time frame wrong and commemorate the wrong things. Here are three ideas for how to make sure you keep only the trophies that bring you joy—and that never mock you.
1. Get the time frame right.
Golfers always complain that they aren’t playing well, because they compare today’s score with their best score ever. Better instead to remember that the only game that matters—if it is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby—is the one you’re playing today. So it is with life. Each day is an adventure with the potential for highs and lows, one full of experiences appropriate to your age and circumstances.
Instead of hanging a medal on the wall that marked some achievement that would be beyond you now, honor the thing that you did today—and that you’ll also be able to do tomorrow. Take a minute each evening to jot down the day’s best moment—maybe it was a conversation or a meal or finishing a project at work. Celebrate it in any way you like (as I’ve confessed before, I like a piece of candy). Put the reminder note about your happy time on the fridge or leave it on your desk. Tomorrow, throw it away and make a new one.
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2. Commemorate what matters.
If you want to keep trophies of your life’s peak achievements, then at least pick the right ones to hold on to: They should be the moments of greatest intrinsic satisfaction, not of extrinsic adulation. I have met award-winning actors and athletes, but I don’t know a single one who would trade celebrating her child’s birthday for winning an Oscar or Olympic gold. As long as the reminder of your greatest loves is connected to a relationship that is still strong and full, celebrating the highlights won’t mock you. Memorialize the relationship with favorite moments: your wedding photo, for example. These trophies remind you that your victory is not a closed and finished episode in your past but something that you’re still winning.
3. If the trophies mock you, toss them.
My friend was finding it hard to clear out the trophy shelf in his office. He is quite attached to all the doodads and pictures of himself, and he fears that he will lose touch with his sense of self-worth without them. But they are interfering with his quality of life, and when he finally gets rid of them, he will feel a lot freer and better—as though he is finally living in the present. You can do the same thing. If a physical object causes you the least bit of chagrin, ditch it.
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is intended as a cautionary tale that juxtaposes ephemeral human magnificence with the remorseless passage of time. The poem ends with these forlorn lines:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I have been to the Egyptian deserts once ruled by Ramesses II, but I had an entirely different reaction to the sands stretching into the distance: I found them indescribably beautiful, not sad. No doubt, this was the same beauty that Shelley’s traveler, contemplating the great king’s fate, could have marveled at. But reflecting on the illusory glory symbolized by the monarch’s derelict statue, he failed to enjoy the natural glory before his very eyes. Don’t make the Ozymandias mistake and miss the beauty of your present by fetishizing the monuments of your past.
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