Even simple choices between concrete alternatives are plagued by forecasting errors, shows Christopher Hsee, an economist from the University of Chicago. As a result, we have a hard time picking the job, the house, or the car that will make us happiest. That's because there is a big difference between the criteria we use to choose something and the criteria we use to evaluate it later. If, for example, you're hemming and hawing over whether to buy a top-of-the-line camera that is bulky and heavy or a second-best model that's easier to carry, the comparative difference in picture quality may steer you toward the unwieldy model. Once you get the fancy camera home, though, you no longer have the lesser-quality photo to compare it with. All you notice is that it's a hassle to lug around—and as a result you barely use it. A better strategy is to try to get a holistic impression of each experience or product you're contemplating, Hsee says. Just consider the first camera and imagine how it would be to use it, without immediately comparing it with the second.
Gilbert has another solution to the prediction problem: asking other people for advice. "Grandmothers, rabbis and philosophers have been telling us for years that we shouldn't want shiny new things, but it's impossible not to," he says. "The important lesson is to learn how to predict more accurately what will give us lasting pleasure versus short-term pleasure, because there are things from the mundane to the transcendental that really do bring pleasure and happiness." His remedy is surrogation, or quite simply, asking people who have already done what you're considering doing how they liked it. "Most of the futures you're contemplating are someone else's memory," he says. While it helps to have a lot in common with a "surrogate," even a randomly chosen person can probably give you a better estimate of how much you would enjoy an experience than would your own impulses.
Yet few people are willing to use this technique. To his dismay, Gilbert's research shows that people would rather close their eyes and imagine a vacation spot, or a new job, than ask someone what that holiday or that career was like for them. This is because although we are remarkably similar in our emotional reactions to events, we like to think of ourselves as unique, Gilbert says. We can correct our forecasting errors, but at a high cost to our self-image—we would rather be original than happy.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman grew up near the Bois de Bologne in Paris, and from time to time, his parents would take him on a trip to the woods. Young Danny, engrossed in some other activity, would scream bloody murder at the prospect of being interrupted. Yet once he got to the woods, he'd get so involved in his play that when it was time to go home, he'd cry again. For Kahneman, those fits of tears are proof that he was a happy child. "When you don't want to stop what you're doing, that's a happy condition," he says. "There is something sad about people who live their lives wanting to be elsewhere."
Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his insights in irrationality and decision-making, but has since turned his attention to well-being. That has led him to study the value of time, "the ultimate finite resource." He's examining the difference between immediate and remembered experience and has zeroed in on the fact that our actual experience and our memories of life operate on separate tracks, and affect our happiness in completely distinct ways. Most psychologists who study happiness have focused on how we think of our lives in retrospect, but Kahneman believes that there's a lot to be learned from looking at "online" happiness—or how we feel in the moment.
Because our memories are all we keep of our experiences, we have a built-in bias that favors memory over immediate experience. Our experiencing self, the part of us that registers events as they happen without anticipation or reflection, doesn't have much of a voice in influencing how happy we are with our lives, he says. Instead, memory dominates. Imagine you've thrown a marvelous party. You've spent hours reveling, but just as the night is winding down, two drunk guests get into a vicious argument. Even though your pleasure during the preceding hours was real, you will remember the event as a total disaster.
That spoiled night is a clear example of the "evaluating self" at work, explains Kahneman. To create a narrative out of life's thousands of disconnected moments, our evaluating self focuses on the most intense moments and the final moments of an experience. That's the way we're built, but our tendency to rely mostly on memory to judge our well-being can lead us to make counterproductive decisions that undermine our own happiness.
For instance, many parents believe they'd be happier if they spent more time with their children. But because spending more time together might not raise the intensity or change the concluding moments of the experience, it won't be reflected in rosier memories. "If you double the time that you spend with your children, it may have very little effect on what you will remember about that time," Kahneman says. If memory is all that matters, spending additional time with your children accomplishes nothing. Another example: You had a great time on summer vacation in Italy last year, so you consider going back. But since returning to the same place wouldn't give you many new memories to savor, your evaluating self might decide against it—even though your experiencing self would clearly enjoy the trip.
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