What Daniel Kahneman found about pleasure and pain—that people were willing to endure pain longer if the ending was relatively pleasant—was found in the narrow context of painful medical procedures, such as colonoscopies. Does this same principle apply to life itself? Psychological scientist Ed Diener found that it does. Diener started with the following straightforward question: Do additional years of lower quality among elderly people enhance or detract from their perceived overall quality of life? In other words, he investigated whether people judge it better to have a shorter life that
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pleasure and pain end preference found to be present when doing a life evaluation. Perceived a better life when dying before they get really bad.
