TEDtalk Tuesday--happiness vs. satisfaction

So, obviously I'm a little late on the "Tuesday" part of TEDtalk Tuesday, but I don't have followers yet, so I suppose it's not going to matter in the end.  Besides, I haven't gone to bed yet.  In my mind, that means it's still Tuesday.

Regardless, I intended to post this while I was in the Atrium today, but I ended up forking up $120 to the rec center all in one go because I decided to be on two intramural teams this quarter, and the line had me occupied for a good portion of my 2 hour break.  By the end, I didn't feel like blogging at all.

BUT here is the reflection on my post I put up earlier today.  If you actually watched the nice embedded video I put up in the last blog, congratulations.  I'm happy that 20min video didn't make you feel like you were wasting time.  TED does have much more engaging presentations, I promise!  It also means you can skip most of this blog, down to the only graphic in this mass of words. 

If you didn't watch the video, or you started to and got bored forgot got hungry clicked on facebook texted distraction avoidance distraction, then you can click this link here, and get back on task:

Daniel Kahneman's talk on the riddle of experience vs. memory

OR, you can read more and I'll summarize in a lengthy fashion.  =)

I’ve found myself watching many TEDtalks on happiness lately (I have another one in the queue about "synthesized happiness").  I’m not unhappy, I’m just curious about what makes me happy.  (yeah, yeah.  I psycho-analyze myself all the time.)

This guy, Daniel Kahneman, invented something called “Behavioral Economics”.  I still have no idea what that is, but there were a few things that stuck out to me in particular as I watched the video in the early hours of the morning from my bed.

“What we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

You see, he states that we are comprised of two selves:  Our experiential self, and our remembering self.  Our experiential self lives moment to moment.  Our remembering self looks back on specific moments, or a series of moments out of the billions of moments we have year to year.  

And those individual moments we experience every second?  The majority of them are lost forever.  They estimate that the psychologic present for a human being is about 3 seconds.  THREE SECONDS!—and then you move on to something else.  I guess that's a good thing. Imagine how slow our processing speed would be if we had to manage all that information?!

So when Mr. Kahneman says that “what we get to keep from our experiences is a story” he’s completely right.  Our lives are a series of summarized stories that we can evaluate later on (assuming your remembering self chose the right story to record).  

And when we imagine our future?  We think of it as anticipated memories.  No wonder we get all depressed when things don’t turn out like we imagined.  We’ll never get to make those memories that we dreamt up in the first place.  

But my question for Mr. Kahneman would be “which of our ‘selves’ is responsible for anticipating the memories of the future?”  Is it the self that lives in the present, or the self that lives in the past?  There must be some overlap--there has to be, if they are conscious of each other.  But then again, I guess they don't need to be conscious of one another.  That may be why we forget even things that make us exceedingly happy--those things we ought to be able to remember.

The whole presentation was pretty much geared toward explaining that “happiness” as an emotion, only exists for the experiencing self.  In essence, you can only be happy in the moment.  When you remember that moment later and smile, it means you are “satisfied” with the memory.  (oh yes, the linguist in me is bubbling over at the psychologist distinguishing the differences between two synonyms.)

Now, I know that “satisfied” and “happy” are not two words that are equal.  But it’s the only way to describe a “good” memory.  If someone were to ask me how my trip to Disneyland was this year, they’d be addressing my remembering self—asking me to pull up the memories and evaluate them.  For a wordsmith, such as myself, the best answer for such a question is more along the lines of “satisfactory” or “fun” or “a good time”, where I attribute an adjective that makes sense.  In no instance would I answer the question with “Oh, my trip was happy.”  That just awkward. (man, I wish my remembering self could call up my grammar class a little more quickly--then I would sound much smarter.)

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Sorry for the wordvomit, guys. There's just a lot to think about

But what I thought was the best part about this presentation was that he explained through research that the quality, or “satisfaction” of a particular memory for our remembering self, is, more often than not, determined by how the particular memory ended.  So if you go through a particularly painful procedure, but end on a less painful note than you began with, you can look back through your remembering self and judge the overall experience as “okay”, rather than “horrible”.  If you end the memory of the doctor visit at the apex of your pain, you’re almost guaranteed to dislike that memory and think of yourself as “unhappy” during that time.

I can’t help but relate this to relationships.  It explains why so many guys can break up with a girl and go from loving her to calling her a psychobitch.  (and I am not trying to be sexist here—girls think the same way sometimes.)

You *had* happy experiences with that girl. But if your last memory was of her throwing a household appliance at your head for breaking up with her, you’re definitely going to label the memory of her as “unsatisfactory”, thus, labeling the unfortunate girl as a psycho.  Perhaps your whole relationship wasn't that bad, and you're probably smart enough to recognize that.  But if you had a smooth break-up, you're probably going to have more positive reactions to that person in the future because you ended on a non-toaster-throwing note.

An ex of mine (and still good friend) had a really bad break-up with a girl last year, and from what I remember, he really liked her.  But when I asked him about her at the bar a few weeks ago, he said she was a psychobitch, noting that she got particularly crazy at the end.  But then he came around and compared her to me, saying I was a "cool ex-girlfriend" (uhh...thanks?).  We hadn't dated for nearly as long, but our break-up was very chill.  We took a walk, he broke up with me, and I asked him why.  He told me why, it made sense, I cried a tiny bit on the way home, we moved on.  And now we're friends again. 

It makes sense (to me--feel free to refute my rationale):  Your experiential self that laughed at her jokes over dinner a few months ago steps aside to let the remembering self protect you from spiraling into depression.  If she’s a psycho, it’s easy to rationalize that the relationship wasn’t worth it in the first place, and you’re better off without her. 

Does that make sense?