What type of happiness do you want?

When we think and talk about happiness what exactly do we mean? The presentation above by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman draws an interesting distinction: there may be two very different types of happiness. 

The first is being happy in your life. It is happiness that we experience immediately and in the moment.

The second is being happy about your life. It is the happiness that exists in memory when we talk about the past and the big picture.

We can enjoy nine-tenths of something blissfully in the moment, yet a lousy ending can bias us and ruin the memory forever.

We often plan holidays around the memories they will later give us ("Mexico!"), rather than doing something we'd enjoy far more in the moment ("catching up on sleep and spending more time with friends.") 

Kahenman suggests we ask ourselves ahead of time what kind of happiness we are seeking.

If you want the rich memories of happiness we should deliberately select for that: go on that exotic holiday, definitely have children and strive to make as much money as possible. These are all things shown to make us happy about our lives.

If you want to be happy in the moment don't travel to fancy places, keep it simple. Don't have children because moment for moment they will dramatically reduce your happiness with crying, complaining, chores and worry. And certainly don't toil to earn more than 30K a year because beyond that, experiential happiness flat lines.

It's a question we all face: Is living in the moment, as encouraged by every Hollywood movie, the right way to live or is it the path of impulsive hedonism?

Is living to create great memories the goal of the mature individual or does it make us a miserable weaver of a fiction that never was?

I leave the answer to you.

But there is advice about being happier in both senses in The Real Secret, which is available in paperback and kindle format on www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk .

Posted by Annabel