What thought goes through your head when you arrive at a social event/ concert/ networking happy hour/ fundraiser/ baby shower/ spoken word poetry night/ pretty much any outing at all:

A) “I’m going to savor this event and loiter linger as long as I can… I’ll probably be the last one here. It won’t be the first time I’ve closed the joint down!”

B) “Where’s the cheese tray? I really hope they have cheese.”

C) “How soon can I leave?”

If you answered A, keep partying like it’s 1999 out there, Animal. I’ll see you on the flip side.
If you answered B, I respect you so much. I’ll save you a piece of Manchego.
If you answered C, hi. I’m looking deep into your soul and what do they say? It takes one to know one? I too have exit fantasies the moment I enter any doorway that isn’t the front door of my home.

I know what it’s like to plan an excursion… to RSVP “yes!” to A Thing and maybe even look forward to it… to pick out an outfit… to have the tickets pulled up in my Ticketmaster app… to have the long weekend booked… to have the special dinner reservation made. But somewhere between the first sip of my cocktail and the second song at the concert, a thought creeps in: Can I go yet?

If this is your inner monologue at most outings, too, welcome to the club—I’m calling it the Experience Minimalist Society—and the good news is that our meetings will be super short because we’ll all be dying to go home within 12 minutes of arriving.

Experience minimalists: we’re not (necessarily) antisocial, introverted, impatient, or featured in an ADD prescription ad. We’re just people with a refined sense of enough-ness. We like to show up, feel the moment, get credit for being there… and bust.

(Experience maximalists, in stark contrast, linger at parties, savor long dinners, eat the last crumbs at the bake sale, get lost in endless operatic arias, and definitely don’t leave the game early just to avoid the exit traffic in the parking lot. They are the endurance athletes of occasions and events, willing to go the distance to the bitter beautiful end.)

Hello, “Experience Efficiency.”

This experience efficiency idea—the drive for us minimalists to extract the essence of an experience quickly, without having to endure the entire time commitment—can be explained by science. Let’s see what cognitive, personality, and motivational psychology has to say about why some of us feel alive at the threshold of an experience, and then a reliably mounting desire to go home.

Pleasure management 101.

One reason some of us are ready to Irish exit after 40 minutes is that the emotional ROI of an event tends to peak early. Research on hedonic adaptation supports this idea: We quickly return to a stable baseline of happiness after positive experiences. This suggests that the emotional payoff of a prolonged experience may not increase in proportion to its duration. That initial dopamine buzz we get when the curtain rises or the first round of shared plates arrives at the tapas place? That’s the high point. Everything after is a gradual descent into can-I-sneak-out-at-intermission energy.

Experience efficiency reflects a cognitive shortcut: Why stay for the whole opera if your emotional response plateaus in the first act?

So if you’re thinking, “That was lovely, and now I’d like to not be here anymore,” that’s not rude—that’s efficient pleasure management, Friendo. Eat your fair share of patatas bravas and bolt.

Time is a currency to be spent wisely.

Time is elastic to some. For others (👋), it’s a precious nonrenewable resource that must be optimized with spreadsheet-like precision. (We get 4,000-ish Mondays to live: I rather obviously vote for optimizing till we drop.)

Those of us in the latter camp display a strong temporal efficiency orientation, meaning we’re highly attuned to how time is spent and whether it feels “worth it.” This relates to research on time perception and opportunity costs… we differ in how we tally up the subjective value of time-based decisions. For experience-efficient individuals, lingering at the company picnic can feel like a missed opportunity for rest, solitude, or participation in anything other than an insufferable company picnic.

So if you’re the type who mentally calculates what else you could be doing during hour two of a three-hour kid’s bouncey-house birthday party, you’re not (necessarily) selfish—you’re just investment-minded. (And here is where I will do a bad job of restraining myself from making a dumb joke about “bouncing from the bounce party.” Get it? Bounce? Apologies.)

This isn’t (necessarily) about being impatient, either—it’s about seeking optimization. We may not dislike the event itself; we simply feel satisfied more quickly than others.

The question isn’t “Did I enjoy this?” It’s “Did I get what I came for, and is more really more?” (No, no it isn’t. We had enough cheese. Go get the car.)

Cognitive overachievers get full fast.

Another contributing factor for this Get In, Get Out propensity could be related to cognitive load theory. Some of us—especially those of us who process information deeply or speedily—may reach cognitive saturation faster in situations with oodles of sensory or interpersonal input. Our brains can only process so much stimuli at conferences, ballets, and escape rooms before they start looking for literal escape hatches. (Important sidenote for escape room owners: WHY ARE THERE SO MANY ROOMS WE HAVE TO ESCAPE FROM? Please put us out of our misery faster.)

High-efficiency experiencers have a natural cutoff point beyond which we begin to fake a family emergency disengage. We’re not (necessarily) bored… once we’ve soaked in the social, visual, or emotional “substance” of the event, staying longer might just lead to diminishing returns.

Think of it like attending a buffet… sampling one or two perfect bites from each dish and calling it a night while everyone else is still lining up for round three at the carving station. (I’ll be taking my dessert to go and eating it on the way home.)

Ending on a memory-seal-of-approval high.

There’s a kind of living-like-you-mean-it elegance in hitting the high note and leaving before the encore. (Another important sidebar: Want to know what’s torture for experience minimalists? Going to a concert where you know one song and THE BAND PLAYS IT FOR THEIR FUCKING ENCORE. Being made to wait until the end of the end, well that’s enough to boycott the band for good.)

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s peak-end rule suggests we remember experiences based on their emotional peak and their ending—not how long they lasted. So if we exit an event while still basking in the glow of its best moment, we might actually remember it more fondly than if we stayed through the slow emotional fade-out.

For us experience-efficient individuals, this aligns with our intuitive behavioral strategy: leave while it’s still good… avoid the slow descension into boredom or that awkward last hour… preserve the memory at its most potent. We’re basically curating our own highlight reel. Our strategy isn’t (necessarily) anti-fun—it’s memory optimization. Now let’s call that Uber (and oh yes, we will absolutely pay for Uber Black if it’s three minutes faster than UberX).

Novelty, but not in bulk.

Many experience-efficient folks score high on what’s known as openness to experience—we’re game for novelty, beauty, insight, and the unexpected. But here’s the nuance: we don’t necessarily want long experiences… just meaningful &/or interesting ones. Once the novelty of an event has worn off, we may look to move on, even if the event is objectively enjoyable. I would rather have a cocktail at the bar of an impossibly cool restaurant and then move onto the taco truck around the corner for dinner, just to shake things up (and okay yes to also get my al pastor fix). It’s possible we derive pleasure from the transition between experiences more than from any experience in full.

Psychologists call this sensation seeking, and for some of us it’s less about skydiving and more about moments that feel alive. When that moment stops feeling alive, we’re out.

Control enthusiasts, unite.

Experience-efficient individuals often like to be in charge of our own pacing. Events that feel open-ended, scripted, or socially sticky (“Wait—I have to stay through all the speeches at your stupid wedding?”) can trigger a subtle sense of internal rebellion. People high in trait autonomy prefer experiences that feel self-directed and time-limited; we’re fine being there, but only if we get to decide how long.

This doesn’t (necessarily) mean we’re control freaks. It means we prefer the existential freedom of deciding when an experience feels complete. The desire to leave early becomes a reclaiming of internal agency, and I’m thinking of having “I’m Reclaiming My Internal Agency By Leaving, Like Imminently” t-shirts made so we can communicate this to event hosts with ease.

It’s a feature, not a flaw.

Here’s the punchline (because I know you’re itching for this article to be over): Not everyone loves to linger. Some of us love to leave. Yep, got it. But wanting things to be over quickly isn’t necessarily about rejecting experience—it may be to honor it differently. Those of us with high experience efficiency aren’t (necessarily) disengaged; we’re simply attuned to scale-tipping moments of joy… we enter with intention, engage as much as we want, and leave before the law of diminishing emotional returns kicks in. It’s not a lack of presence—it’s a preference for concentrated presence.

Our culture ruefully tends to celebrate endurance, hustle, and a “Stay Until the End to Wring Every Drop from This Event” ethic, so this “sneak out the side door” behavior can seem oddballish. But maybe it’s time we gave a little leeway to those who know when the moment is over… maybe we reframe this experience efficiency behavior as strategic rather than pathological.

Maybe us experience minimalists don’t have to sneak out the side door or Irish exit without an exhausting round of goodbyes? Maybe we’ll one day get to live in a world where it’s okay to neatly fold our napkins after the apps are served and put our coats on (if we even took them off in the first place—because anyone with a valid Experience Minimalist Society membership card knows cardinal rule #1: “Thou shall leave your jacket on so as to signal your ever-ephemeral attendance”)… and you’ll give us grace for arriving in the first place, bringing the Malbec, and getting the hell out of Dodge.

You owe us, after all: when we leave early, there’s more cheese for the rest of you. Peace out.