The Psychology of Happiness
I have said very little in this book about the current state of psychological science as it relates to human well-being. This research—which occasionally goes by the name of "positive psychology"—is in its infancy, especially when it comes to understanding the relevant details at the level of the brain. And given the difficulty of defining human well-being, coupled with the general reluctance of scientists to challenge anyone's beliefs about it, it is sometimes hard to know what is being studied in this research. What does it mean, for instance, to compare self-reported ratings of "happiness" or "life satisfaction" between individuals or across cultures? I'm not at all sure. Clearly, a person's conception of what is possible in human life will affect her judgment of whether she has made the best use of her opportunities, met her goals, developed deep friendships, etc. Some people will go to bed tonight proud to have merely reduced their daily consumption of methamphet-amine; others will be frustrated that their rank on the Forbes 400 list has slipped into the triple digits. Where one is satisfied to be in life often has a lot to do with where one has been.
I once knew a very smart and talented man who sent an email to dozens of friends and acquaintances declaring his intention to kill himself. As you might expect, this communication prompted a flurry of responses. While I did not know him well, I sent several emails urging him to seek professional counseling, to try antidepressants, to address his sleep issues, and to do a variety of other obvious things to combat depression. In each of his replies, however, he insisted that he was not depressed. He believed himself to be acting on a philosophical insight: everyone dies eventually; life, therefore, is ultimately pointless; thus, there is no reason to keep on living if one doesn't want to.
We went back and forth on these topics, as I sought to persuade him that his "insight" was itself a symptom of depression or some other mood disorder. I argued that if he simply felt better, he wouldn't believe that his life was no longer worth living. No doubt many other people had similar exchanges with him. These communications seemed to nudge him away from the precipice for a while. Four years later, however, he committed suicide.
Experiences of this kind reveal how difficult it can be to discuss the subject of human well-being. Communication on any subject can be misleading, of course, because people often use the same words quite differently. Talking about states of mind poses special difficulties, however. Was my friend really "depressed" in my sense of the term? Did he even know what I meant by "depression"? Did / know what I should have meant by it? For instance, are there forms of depression that have yet to be differentiated which admit of distinct remedies? And is it possible that my friend suffered from none of these? Is it, in other words, possible for a person to see no point in living another day, and to be motivated to kill himself, without experiencing any disorder of mood? Two things seem quite clear to me at this point: such questions have answers, and yet we often do not know enough about human experience to even properly discuss the questions themselves.
We can mean many things when using words like "happiness" and "well-being." This makes it difficult to study the most positive aspects of human experience scientifically. In fact, it makes it difficult for many of us to even know what goals in life are worth seeking. Just how happy and fulfilled should we expect to be in our careers or intimate relationships?
Much of the skepticism I encounter when speaking about these issues comes from people who think "happiness" is a superficial state of mind and that there are far more important things in life than "being happy." Some readers may think that concepts like "well-being" and "flourishing" are similarly effete. However, I don't know of any better terms with which to signify the most positive states of being to which we can aspire. One of the virtues of thinking about a moral landscape, the heights of which remain to be discovered, is that it frees us from these semantic difficulties. Generally speaking, we need only worry about what it will mean to move "up" as opposed to "down."
Some of what psychologists have learned about human well-being confirms what everyone already knows: people tend to be happier if they have good friends, basic control over their lives, and enough money to meet their needs. Loneliness, helplessness, and poverty are not recommended. We did not need science to tell us this.
But the best of this research also reveals that our intuitions about happiness are often quite wrong. For instance, most of us feel that having more choices available to us—when seeking a mate, choosing a career, shopping for a new stove, etc.—is always desirable. But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we choose. 5 Knowing this, it could be rational to strategically limit one's choices. Anyone who has ever remodeled a home will know the glassy-eyed anguish of having gone to one too many stores in search of the perfect faucet.
One of the most interesting things to come out of the research on human happiness is the discovery that we are very bad judges of how we will feel in the future—an ability that the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has called "affective forecasting." Gilbert and others have shown that we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and bad experiences will affect us. 6 Changes in wealth, health, age, marital status, etc., tend not to matter as much as we think they will—and yet we make our most important decisions in life based on these inaccurate assumptions. It is useful to know that what we think will matter often matters much less than we think. Conversely, things we consider trivial can actually impact our lives greatly. If you have ever been impressed by how people often rise to the occasion while experiencing great hardship but can fall to pieces over minor inconveniences, you have seen this principle at work. The general finding of this research is now uncontroversial: we are poorly placed to accurately recall the past, to perceive the present, or to anticipate the future with respect to our own happiness. It seems little wonder, therefore, that we are so often unfulfilled.
Which Self Should We Satisfy?
If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment—by giving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their mental state—you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information "the experiencing self" and the second "the remembering self." And his justification for partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two "selves" often disagree. Indeed, they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time. We saw this earlier with respect to Kahneman's data on colonoscopies: because "the remembering self" evaluates any experience by reference to its peak intensity and its final moments (the "peak/end rule"), it is possible to improve its lot, at the expense of "the experiencing self," by simply prolonging an unpleasant procedure at its lowest level of intensity (and thereby reducing the negativity of future memories).
What applies to colonoscopies seems to apply elsewhere in life. Imagine, for instance, that you want to go on vacation: You are deciding between a trip to Hawaii and a trip to Rome. On Hawaii, you envision yourself swimming in the ocean, relaxing on the beach, playing tennis, and drinking mai tais. Rome will find you sitting in cafes, visiting museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine. Which vacation should you choose? It is quite possible that your "experiencing self" would be much happier on Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of Rome one year hence. Which self would be right? Does the question even make sense? Kahneman observes that while most of us think our "experiencing self" must be more important, it has no voice in our decisions about what to do in life. After all, we can't choose from among experiences; we must choose from among remembered (or imagined) experiences. And, according to Kahneman, we don't tend to think ab
out the future as a set of experiences; we think of it as a set of "anticipated memories." 7 The problem, with regard to both doing science and living one's life, is that the "remembering self" is the only one who can think and speak about the past. It is, therefore, the only one who can consciously make decisions in light of past experience.
According to Kahneman, the correlation in well-being between these two "selves" is around 0.5. 8 This is essentially the same correlation observed between identical twins, or between a person and himself a decade later. 9 It would seem, therefore, that about half the information about a person's happiness is still left on the table whichever "self" we consult. What are we to make of a "remembering self" who claims to have a wonderful life, while his "experiencing self" suffers continuous marital stress, health complaints, and career anxiety? And what of a person whose "remembering self" claims to be deeply dissatisfied— having failed to reach his most important goals—but whose moment-to-moment state of happiness is quite high? Kahneman seems to think that there is no way to reconcile disparities of this sort. If true, this would appear to present a problem for any science of morality.
It seems clear, however, that the "remembering self" is simply the "experiencing self" in one of its modes. Imagine, for instance, that you are going about your day quite happily, experiencing one moment of contentment after the next, when you run into an old rival from school. Looking like the very incarnation of success, he asks what you have made of yourself in the intervening decades. At this point your "remembering self" steps forward and, feeling great chagrin, admits "not so much." Let us say that this encounter pitches you into a crisis of self-doubt that causes you to make some drastic decisions, affecting both your family and career. All of these moments are part of the fabric of your experience, however, whether recollected or not. Conscious memories and self-evaluations are themselves experiences that lay the foundation for future experiences. Making a conscious assessment of your life, career, or marriage feels a certain way in the present and leads to subsequent thoughts and behaviors. These changes will also feel a certain way and have further implications for your future. But none of these events occur outside the continuum of your experience in the present moment (i.e., the "experiencing self").
If we could take the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human life and assess a person's well-being at each point in time, the distinction between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self" would disappear. Yes, the experience of recalling the past often determines what we decide to do in the future—and this greatly affects the character of one's future experience. But it would still be true to say that in each of the 2.5 billion seconds of an average life, certain moments were pleasant, and others were painful; some were later recalled with greater or lesser fidelity, and these memories had whatever effects they had later on. Consciousness and its ever-changing contents remain the only subjective reality.
Thus, if your "remembering self" claims to have had a wonderful time in Rome, while your "experiencing self" felt only boredom, fatigue, and despair, then your "remembering self" (i.e., your recollection of the trip) is simply wrong about what it was like to be you in Rome. This becomes increasingly obvious the more we narrow our focus: Imagine a "remembering self" who thinks that you were especially happy while sitting for fifteen minutes on the Spanish Steps; while your "experiencing self" was, in fact, plunged deeper into misery for every one of those minutes than at any other point on the trip. Do we need two selves to account for this disparity? No. The vagaries of memory suffice.
As Kahneman admits, the vast majority of our experiences in life never get recalled, and the time we spend actually remembering the past is comparatively brief. Thus, the quality of most of our lives can be assessed only in terms of whatever fleeting character it has as it occurs. But this includes the time we spend recalling the past. Amid this flux, the moments in which we construct a larger story about our lives appear like glints of sunlight on a dark river: they may seem special, but they are part of the current all the same.
On Being Right or Wrong
It is clear that we face both practical and conceptual difficulties when seeking to maximize human well-being. Consider, for instance, the tensions between freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and the duty of every government to keep its citizens safe. Each of these principles seems fundamental to a healthy society. The problem, however, is that at their extremes, each is hostile to the other two. Certain forms of speech painfully violate people's privacy and can even put society itself in danger. Should I be able to film my neighbor through his bedroom window and upload this footage onto YouTube as a work of "journalism"? Should I be free to publish a detailed recipe for synthesizing smallpox? Clearly, appropriate limits to free expression exist. Likewise, too much respect for privacy would make it impossible to gather the news or to prosecute criminals and terrorists. And too zealous a commitment to protecting innocent people can lead to unbearable violations of both privacy and freedom of expression. How should we balance our commitment to these various goods?
We may never be able to answer this question with absolute precision. It seems quite clear, however, that questions like this have answers. Even if there are a thousand different ways to optimally tune these three variables, given concomitant changes in the rest of culture, there must be many more ways that are less than optimal—and people will suffer as a result.
What would it mean for a couple to decide that they should have a child? It probably means they think that their own well-being will tend to increase for having brought another person into the world; it should also mean that they expect their child to have a life that is, on balance, worth living. If they didn't expect these things, it's hard to see why they would want to have a child in the first place.
However, most of the research done on happiness suggests that people actually become less happy when they have children and do not begin to approach their prior level of happiness until their children leave home. 10 Let us say that you are aware of this research but imagine that you will be an exception. Of course, another body of research shows that most people think that they are exceptions to rules of this sort: there is almost nothing more common than the belief that one is above average in intelligence, wisdom, honesty, etc. But you are aware of this research as well, and it does not faze you. Perhaps, in your case, all relevant exceptions are true, and you will be precisely as happy a parent as you hope to be. However, a famous study of human achievement suggests that one of the most reliable ways to diminish a person's contributions to society is for that person to start a family. 11 How would you view your decision to have a child if you knew that all the time you spent changing diapers and playing with Legos would prevent you from developing the cure for Alzheimer's disease that was actually within your reach?
These are not empty questions. But neither are they the sorts of questions that anyone is likely to answer. The decision to have a child may always be made in the context of reasonable (and not so reasonable) expectations about the future well-being of all concerned. It seems to me that thinking in this way is, nevertheless, to contemplate the moral landscape.
If we are not able to perfectly reconcile the tension between personal and collective well-being, there is still no reason to think that they are generally in conflict. Most boats will surely rise with the same tide. It is not at all difficult to envision the global changes that would improve life for everyone: We would all be better off in a world where we devoted fewer of our resources to preparing to kill one another. Finding clean sources of energy, cures for disease, improvements in agriculture, and new ways to facilitate human cooperation are general goals that are obviously worth striving for. What does such a claim mean? It means that we have every reason to believe that the pursuit of such goals will lead upward on the slopes of the moral landscape.
The claim that science could have something important to say about values (because values relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures) i
s an argument made on first principles. As such, it doesn't rest on any specific empirical results. That does not mean that this claim couldn't be falsified, however. Clearly, if there is a more important source of value that has nothing to do with the well-being of conscious creatures (in this life or a life to come), my thesis would be disproved. As I have said, however, I cannot conceive of what such a source of value could be: for if someone claimed to have found it somewhere, it could be of no possible interest to anyone, by definition.
There are other ways that my thesis could be falsified, however. There would be no future science of morality, for instance, if human well-being were completely haphazard and unrelated to states of the brain. If some people are made happiest by brain state X, while others are made miserable by it, there would be no neural correlate of human well-being. Alternately, a neural correlate of human well-being might exist, but it could be invoked to the same degree by antithetical states of the world. In this case, there would be no connection between a person's inner life and his or her outer circumstances. If either of these scenarios were true, we could not make any general claims about human flourishing. However, if this is the way the world works, the brain would seem to be little more than insulation for the skull, and the entire field of neuroscience would constitute an elaborate and very costly method of misunderstanding the world. Again, this is an intelligible claim, but that does not mean that intelligent people should take it seriously.