STREET DOGS

From Ephrat Livnin at Quartz: Daniel Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and the kind of life we want. And working towards the one may undermine our ability to experience the other.

Spending time with friends, for example, makes us happy but when we focus on long-term goals we don’t necessarily prioritise socialising, as we’re too busy with the bigger picture.

Such choices led Kahneman to conclude that we’re not as interested in happiness as we may claim. “People want to maximise their satisfaction, and that leads in completely different directions than the maximisation of happiness,” he says. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks – achieving goals, meeting expectations.”

Money, for example, has a significant influence on life satisfaction. Poverty creates suffering, but above a certain level of income that satisfies our basic needs, wealth doesn’t increase happiness. In other words, if your basic needs are covered, you’re capable of being at least as happy as the world’s wealthiest people.

The fleeting feelings of happiness don’t necessarily add up to life satisfaction. A person who has had many happy moments may not feel pleased on the whole.

The key is memory. Satisfaction is retrospective. Happiness occurs in real time. Kahneman found that people tell themselves a story about their lives, which may or may not add up to a pleasing tale. Many of our happiest moments aren’t preserved — but just happen. And then they’re gone.

So, we should ask ourselves, do we want to be happy, experience positive feelings, or simply wish to construct narratives that seem worth telling ourselves and others.