The ending isn’t the only part of the movie. If you only care how it ends, you’ll miss the whole thing.

Judging a long stretch of time by how it finished throws away almost all of it. A friendship that ended badly was not therefore bad for four years, and a season that ended in a loss still contained everything you did in it. Endings are vivid, which is not the same as being representative.

When you catch yourself summarizing something by its final chapter, make yourself recall the middle. Name two parts that were genuinely good at the time. That is not denial, it is a fairer count of what actually happened.