At this point, we’ve established that maximizing personal well-being is the purpose of human existence—a branch of Normative Ethics in moral philosophy called Hedonistic Egoism. The next logical question becomes: well, how do we do that? In order to answer this question, we need to understand what well-being is and what its foundations are.

The field of Positive Psychology has yielded a number of models to explain such matters, but I’ve found that each has its shortcomings. There are, however, many ideas that have resonated with me and I’ve combined them in a way that I believe best reflects the truth of what well-being is.

The first idea is that we are only capable of accurately stating how we feel in the present. One of the famous experiments demonstrating our inability to accurately assess past well-being is detailed in Daniel Khaneman’s paper “Experienced Utility and Objective Happiness: A Moment-Based Approach.” In the study, patients had colonoscopies and reported how much pain they were experiencing every 60 seconds, thus providing a moment-based conception of utility. These moments could be added to up a total as a moment-based assessment of the procedure. After the procedure, patients were also asked to evaluate the experience and this where disagreements between the moment-based assessment and the memory-based assessment came into play. As it turns out, people’s memories are biased by the Peak/End rule, which states that we overly assess memories by the peaks and the end of the experience. This being the case, patients whose procedures were shorter, but had higher peaks, rated the experience more negatively despite less overall pain in the moment-by-moment account. Interestingly, because the end also impacts our memory-based assessments, patients who had the procedure extended by a minute, where there was no movement of the apparatus (and hence less pain, though still distinct discomfort), rated the experience better. In other words, adding more total discomfort by extending the procedure, but making sure there was minimal pain during the end resulted in better evaluations.

So which evaluation should we trust between the experiencing and remembering self? Consider the hypothetical situation where we’re able to capture the instantaneous well-being of two people (Subject A and B) for their entire lives—where every high and low is plotted in real time on a graphs of their lifetime well-being. Let’s say that the range of well-being is quantified from -5 to 5 with -5 being the worst possible suffering, 0 being indifference, and 5 being the most possible pleasure:

If we took the integral of the graph to get the sum of the area under the curve (positive area minus negative area), this would be their total instantaneous well-being. We’ll imagine that Subject A has a total instantaneous well-being of +1 and Subject B has a total instantaneous well-being of -1. Despite more instantaneous well-being, Subject A rates their life at -1 since their peak experiences and most present experiences bias them to evaluate more negatively. Subject B, however, rates their life at +1 since their peak and recent experiences are more positive. If we had to choose which life we wanted, which would we choose? It seems intuitive to me to prefer the life of Subject A because, despite their negative evaluation, they actually experience more positivity overall. The negative evaluation is really just a single present reflection on the past and if had asked them to rate their life during a peak period, we’d likely get a similarly biased answer. This is a clear-cut case where a flaw in the way our memory works leads us to incorrect assessments.

Related, but off-topic:

In my opinion, the only way to reduce this error is to track our instantaneous well-being more closely. Though we may never get a perfect record of our subjective utility of every-moment, our accuracy in assessment reduces as a function of time. This is to say that trying to evaluate how happy we are now is the most accurate, how happy we were today is less accurate, how happy we were yesterday is even less accurate, etc. I’ve tracked my daily well-being for the past year so far, making sure to document as best I can the events that cause changes in my assessment. The black line represents my daily rating and the red dashed line is a two-week moving average:

There are all sorts of interesting findings within this data set, but I’ll just mention some I found amusing:

My average daily well-being is 0.53

My average work-day well-being is 0.39 and average non-work-day well-being is 0.78

Monday through Saturday has an increasing average daily well-being from 0.24 to 0.81

All my peak positive experiences are related to either meeting new people or getting hooked on a new video game

All my peak negative experiences are related to either terrible days at work or extreme physical pain through running/backpacking

I’d like to point out that even the above is still highly flawed since I’m subject to the same Duration Neglect that our colonoscopy patients were—my daily ratings are biased by the fact that I undercount how long each pleasure/pain lasts, only recalling how relatively extreme it was. How I’m feeling when I make the assessment at the end of the day also biases my opinion of the entire day. Still, it’s the best I’ve got until I can come up with a way of tracking my instantaneous well-being throughout the day via a random beeper or something. I’d love to have a rich dataset of instantaneous well-being for a large sample of people, but that’s a dream for future research.

Back on topic:

So now we’re at a point where we know that a person’s well-being is the sum of their instantaneous experiences. Still, the question remains: what comprises an instantaneous assessment of well-being? If I ask you, “How are you doing?” what happens in your brain when drafting an answer? This, to me, is where many contemporary models on well-being are guilty of neglect. For instance, founder of Positive Psychology Martin Seligman has put forth a model he calls PERMA, which is an acronym for Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Each of which, Seligman posits is a foundational source of well-being and we can roughly assess the total well-being a person has by the degree to which they have each foundational component. While I tend to agree that this categorization of foundations is correct, it’s not tied concretely to instantaneous well-being nor does it take into account the biases that affect these evaluations. What I mean by this is that a person leading a life of addiction who severely lacks all elements of PERMA, but is high on heroin would evaluate their instantaneous well-being as perhaps a 5 on our -5 to 5 scale. This is to say that their current perception of subjective well-being defies Seligman’s assessment that they are unhappy since they lack all PERMA, except perhaps Positive Emotion (caused by the heroin). What this means is that extremes bias our instantaneous assessments—that each part of PERMA is weighted up or down based on how salient it is. Another example of this would be the mother who just had her first baby. Though she is surely in physical pain and exhausted, a higher weight might be assigned to the feeling of Meaning or Accomplishment that tilts the assessment of instantaneous well-being well into the positives as she holds her newborn child.

What I’m about to propose is a temporally-bounded and bias-acknowledging model of instantaneous well-being. In other words, this is what happens when I ask you “How are you?” Almost immediately, two sources of information are assessed: your immediate physical sensations and your top-of-mind life satisfaction. I’ve illustrated the model below:

The assessment of physical sensations involves the senses of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell felt in the moment. This is the most accurate and unbiased part of the equation since little is required in the way of memory or prospection. Still, in quantifying physical sensations over time, we would use the number we gave a minute ago as a reference for the current experience, which can lead to boiling-frog situations. What this means is that if we put someone in a hot tub and ask for their physical well-being, they might say +1. If the temperature increases very slowly, they may continue to say they are still experiencing a +1, despite actually feeling more discomfort than they did when they started. One of the biases that works against an objective evaluation here is an anchoring effect where an initial number given to the experience (like “+1 for hot tubbing”) anchors us at that point and makes us more likely to evaluate future hot tub experiences at +1 despite different sensations like increased temperature.

Top-of-mind life satisfaction, however, is much more subjective and can easily be tilted in positive or negative directions based on a number of cognitive flaws including the Peak/End rule, Duration Neglect, priming, and a host of others. The reason I emphasize “top-of-mind” is that we don’t conduct a thorough, objective evaluation of our entire lives when evaluating. Instead, when we think about life satisfaction, we’re thinking about the most salient aspects of our lives offered to us through the workings of our subconscious minds. It’s similar to what happens in your brain if I ask, “What is the first historical person that comes to mind.” You don’t generate a full list of all historical people you know and choose one from the list. Rather, your subconscious simply returns a person without your conscious consideration. Chances are it was Abraham Lincoln. Whatever your subconscious mind yields for consideration are the inputs for comparisons. Generally speaking, if the data points subconsciously generated indicate a positive trend, then we return a higher life satisfaction. If a negative trend, then lower. To illustrate this concept, I’ve created a few cases to consider:

Case 1:

Sally is extremely intelligent, highly accomplished, and has a rich social life. She just got done researching the process of getting into graduate school and is feeling daunted by all the requirements and the possibility of rejection. When asked to score her life satisfaction, her subconscious mind is primed to generate a future vision of grueling studying followed by a rejection letter. In other words, her mind is biased to think too much about future failure (a decrease in the Accomplishment of PERMA) relative to the present and past. Other considerations like how her relationship with her boyfriend is getting better, how she ran a marathon, or how she was promoted within the year are dampened because of the saliency of these graduate school thoughts. Because her mind is focused on these thoughts and they indicate a negative Accomplishment trend, life satisfaction is rated negatively.

Case 2:

Consider Sally again. This time, she’s completed the GRE and got her scores today which indicate that she has a high likelihood of admission to the school of her choosing. There’s a good chance Sally with focus in on the high probability of a future Accomplishment in her assessment and give an overly-high rating due to the positive trend. She’ll likely focus less on her company’s layoffs and how her position is at risk depending on the direction the new CEO wants to go.

This is how it works for every assessment of life satisfaction—our subconscious generates comparison points in either the future or past based on how it was primed and we draw a mental trend line. Whether or not the data points generated are the most objective are not a part of the process in our top-of-mind evaluation. It matters very little if we can sit down and bring all the facts for an accurate assessment since this is irrelevant to the key metric of total well-being, which is instantaneous well-being. While it is true that at the conclusion of an exhaustive effort to evaluate life satisfaction, our subconscious mind may generate those results when we evaluate current life-satisfaction, the relevancy of these efforts is linked directly to how salient they are. In fact, as I’ll discuss in future blogs, making a conscious effort to focus on positive trends is a neat tactic for increasing well-being.

Conclusions:

Total well-being is the sum of instantaneous well-being for each moment of one’s life—this is what we want to maximize! Instantaneous well-being is wrought with bias, but ultimately tethered to foundations in well-being related to PERMA. Going forward, we’ll explore strategies to take advantage of our cognitive flaws and make decisions that will improve our well-being.