Slippery Happiness

Here is a nice talk by Daniel Kahneman on research in "happiness". This talk focuses on the slippery understanding we have of happiness because of our confusion between "as experienced" and "as remembered".



I enjoy the paradoxes he calls up. We think we know ourself, but as he points out, we have a complexity within ourself that unless pointed out, we probaby never realize and therefore get fooled by what he calls the "remembered self". I especially enjoyed the bit where he says the correlation between the experiencing self and the remembering self. That is amazing.

Note: The last two minutes of this video are very important. Here they pose the question of happiness research as a guide for public policy. It is obvious to me that this should be done. Kahneman believes it will. But I think that despite the fact that it should and that an expert thinks it will, my gut belief is that American's won't. Their political prejudices won't let them embrace this scientific research. To embrace it would be to embrace a role of government in their lives while the whole premise of much of America is a "freedom from" government rather than a vision of a positive role for government in their lives.