Remembering happiness

What makes us happy? Lots of money, social status, true love, our genetic predispositions -- the list goes on. However, studies have shown that the aforementioned factors make surprisingly little contribution to our happiness. In this post, I explore some useful models of thinking about happiness and share some practical tips.

In Living, and thinking about it: two perspectives on life, Kahneman and Riis (2005)¹ discuss the distinction between answers to questions about one’s feelings in the past and in the present. How we feel in the moment is the experiencing self and how we feel about the past is the remembering self.

The experiencing self is ephemeral. You could be sipping margarita on a beach one moment and spilling your drink next, or find out your credit card got declined for the replacement drink. I cannot recall who said this²: "when asked how things could get better, you can think of a few things like winning the lottery (JP: which, by the way, is as effective at increasing your long-term happiness as becoming a quadriplegic³) but there are infinitely many ways for things to go wrong".

How is happiness measured? If we think of our life as a sequence of moments in time, we could average out how the experiencing self felt in each moment. But our memory does not work this way. As previously mentioned, the remembering self is biased with the peak/end rule. Our evaluation can mostly be explained by the peak and final emotions with little regard for the total duration.

To highlight the difference between the two selves, Kahneman asks⁴:

Suppose you’re planning a vacation and you’re just told that at the end of the vacation, you’ll get an amnesic drug to remember nothing and they’ll also destroy your photos so there will be nothing [left]. Would you still go to the same vacation [or plan a different vacation]?

Luckily for me, I don't need amnesic drugs because I am blessed with the memory of a goldfish. I say blessed because there are three benefits to having bad memory. First, I cannot rely on what happened before to make decisions so decision-making is done through my mental models or from first principles. Second, I am less influenced by memories of a bad event, which I suspect makes me more resilient⁵. You can’t feel sorry for yourself if you don’t recall your woes. Third, I cannot recall but I’m sure it’s important. This got me wondering: if you can’t remember anything, do you really change as a person?

In the book The Power of Habit⁶, Charles Duhigg describes Eugene Pauly, a man known in literature as E.P.⁷ who developed severe amnesia following a case of viral encephalitis. Eugene was not able to form any new memories but scientists studying him found that he was able to improve his performance on three-word sentence tests over a 12-week period. But when the researchers switched the order of words, E.P. could not get the answers right. Thus, his learning was more of a habit formation -- like riding a bicycle.

Even in the absence of recalled memory, the ego can change through learned habits and altered neurochemistry. I would posit that it is short-sighted to rely only on the remembering self to make judgements on happiness and what one should do to maximize it. For those of us that don't have severe amnesia like E.P., how does memory influence our emotional well-being and life satisfaction?

As described in prospect theory, our brain is constantly setting new reference points. Research seems to indicate that experiences drive more happiness than material goods⁸. Instead of buying a new gadget, you will derive more remembered happiness with a vacation. Even marriage cannot escape reference points. Lucas et al. (2003)⁹ showed that tying the knot only provides a bump in happiness in the two years following.

Once a higher reference point has been set, the same experience that used to bring you joy (e.g., bigger house, nicer car) brings you less joy, and the peak/end rule spoils your memory of it. To combat this feature of the mind, perhaps car manufacturers ought to add more features or unlock more horsepower over time. Coincidently, I think that’s called a Tesla but I digress.

Speaking of digressions, I am aware that my writing tends to explore the underlying framework of things rather than providing practical tips. It’s as if you are wandering in the desert, looking for an oasis, and I show up and tell you how oases are formed. In case you were wondering.

Strange analogies aside -- okay, one more -- allow me to offer you a cup of tea to wet the mouth. In her course “The Science of Well-Being”, Yale professor Laurie Santos shares some practical tips for happiness. To reset your reference points, you can concretely re-experience the old reference points, avoid social comparisons, and interrupt your consumption. To thwart hedonic adaptation, you can practice savouring (stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it), negative visualization (e.g., imagining how you may have never met your partner), and gratitude¹⁰.

One wonders how these tactics will shift the results of happiness studies. Will it show that people are generally happier with what they have and shift all numbers up equally? Or will it show a preference for the experiencing self?

Kahneman said recently that he abandoned happiness research because he couldn’t quite figure it out. If people actually feel happier focusing on the best vacation or the best Instagram picture of it instead of tying the knot, who are we to tell them what should make them happy?

One might hesitate to make value judgements by saying you should enjoy the moment instead of taking the perfect vacation picture. It feels wrong to disparage our natural predispositions. But I believe one should make reasonable efforts to think about their value system and attempt to align it with their behaviour. This ability, in some sense, is what makes us human. Applying the practical tips for happiness affirms our commitment to a value system which ought to be consciously chosen, not dictated by our genes or other people.

What does your value system look like? If you want to be remembered positively by others, you should make lots of money, be somewhat miserly throughout your life, and go out with a bang of a charity donation to a noble cause before you croak. Leave it to the peak/end rule to overwrite a lifetime of being a scrooge. Instead, if you want to be a force for good in the world, what might you want to do? And would you do anything different if you knew that you will, one day, be forgotten?

¹Kahneman and Riis (2005). Living, and thinking about it: two perspectives on life. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/kahneman/files/living_dk_jr_2005.pdf
²See first sentence of the Memory section.
³Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 36(8), 917–927. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.36.8.917
⁴Fridman (2020). Daniel Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #65. https://youtu.be/UwwBG-MbniY?t=2636
⁵I haven’t found scientific evidence to support this claim. Some studies seem to suggest lower neuroticism leads to better long-term memory performance but others saw the opposite. The relationship between long-term memory and resilience is unclear to me.
⁶Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. New York: Random House.
⁷Insausti et al. (2013). Human amnesia and the medial temporal lobe illuminated by neuropsychological and neurohistological findings for patient E.P.. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306244110
⁸Kumar A, Killingsworth MA, Gilovich T. Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases. Psychological Science. 2014;25(10):1924-1931. doi:10.1177/0956797614546556
⁹Lucas, R. E., Clark, A. E., Georgellis, Y., & Diener, E. (2003). Reexamining adaptation and the set point model of happiness: Reactions to changes in marital status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(3), 527–539. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.3.527
¹⁰I am always at the mercy of the availability heuristic but the former seems to be a nod to prospect theory while the latter attempts to shift the focus to the experiencing self instead of the remembering self.