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The word memorable is often used to describe vacation highlights, explicitly revealing the goal of the
it is the remembering self that chooses vacations. They asked students to maintain daily diaries and record a daily evaluation of their experiences during spring break.
However, some people say that they would not bother to go at all, revealing that they care only about their remembering self,
because these experiences are mostly painful in real time and gain value from the expectation that both the pain and the joy of reaching the goal will be memorable.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
the narrative of a life of integrity, which is endangered by the latest episode.”
enthralled by a film,
The resistance to interruption was a sign I had been having a good time, both with my toys and with the swings.
It appears that a small fraction of the population does most of the suffering—whether because of physical or mental illness, an unhappy temperament, or the misfortunes and personal tragedies in their life.
Frenchwomen spend less time with their children but enjoy it more, perhaps because they have more access to child care and spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities.
time pressure (a significant source of negative affect), and
When happily in love, we may feel joy even when caught in traffic, and if grieving, we may remain depressed when watching a funny movie.
The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.
another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise. From
and the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives.
is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.
however, religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry.
The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.
Severe poverty amplifies the experienced effects of other misfortunes of life. In particular, illness is much worse for the very poor than for those who are more comfortable.
The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero.
A plausible interpretation is that higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. There is suggestive evidence in favor of this idea: priming students with the idea of wealth reduces the pleasure their face expresses as they eat a bar of chocolate!
Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.”
“Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.”
determined by a small sample of highly available ideas, not by a careful weighting of the domains of your life.
time course
A disposition for well-being is as heritable as height or intelligence, as demonstrated by studies of twins separated at birth.
striking evidence of the lifelong effects of the goals that young people set for themselves.
Goals make a large difference. Nineteen years after they stated their financial aspirations, many of the people who wanted a high income had achieved
The importance that people attached to income at age 18 also anticipated their satisfaction with their income as adults.
The people who wanted money and got it were significantly more satisfied than average;
one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain.
They must be using heuristics, which are examples of both substitution and WYSIATI.
Any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation. This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence:
affective forecasting.
Indeed, there was no difference whatsoever between the life satisfaction of students in California and in the Midwest.
and we were able to trace their error to an exaggerated belief in the importance of climate. We described the error as a focusing illusion.
Thoughts of any aspect of life are more likely to be salient if a contrasting alternative is highly available.
In particular, it makes us prone to exaggerate the effect of significant purchases or changed circumstances on our future well-being.
The focusing illusion creates a bias in favor of goods and experiences that are initially exciting,
but decision utility corresponds to the anticipated intensity of the reaction to the news that one has won.
as only that thin slice of time is considered.
The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.
Choosing by the quality of the memory may be justified in extreme cases, for example when post-traumatic stress is a possibility,
The rules that govern the evaluation of the past are poor guides for decision making, because time does
The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.
The time that people spend dwelling on a memorable moment should be included in its duration,
Similarly, a brief awful event that causes PTSD should be weighted by the total duration of the long-term misery it causes.
an index of the amount of suffering in society will someday be included in national statistics, along with measures of unemployment, physical disability, and income. This project has come a long way.
The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.
Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.
