Everybody talks about happiness these days . 
I had somebody count the number of books with " happiness " in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40 , and there were many more . 
There is a huge wave of interest in happiness , among researchers . 
There is a lot of happiness coaching . 
Everybody would like to make people happier . 
But in spite of all this flood of work , there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness . 
And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps . 
This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness , and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness , because it turns out we 're just as messed up as anybody else is . 
The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity . 
It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things . 
I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it but , by and large , this is something that we 'll have to give up and we 'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is . 
The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory : basically it 's between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life . 
And those are two very different concepts , and they 're both lumped in the notion of happiness . 
And the third is the focusing illusion , and it 's the unfortunate fact that we can 't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance . 
I mean , this is a real cognitive trap . 
There 's just no way of getting it right . 
Now , I 'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures reported a story . 
He said he 'd been listening to the symphony and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording , there was a dreadful screeching sound . 
And then he added , really quite emotionally , it ruined the whole experience . 
But it hadn 't . 
What it had ruined were the memories of the experience . 
He had had the experience . 
He had had 20 minutes of glorious music . 
They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory ; the memory was ruined , and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep . 
What this is telling us , really , is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves . 
There is an experiencing self , who lives in the present and knows the present , is capable of re-living the past , but basically it has only the present . 
It 's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know , when the doctor asks , " Does it hurt now when I touch you here ? " 
And then there is a remembering self , and the remembering self is the one that keeps score , and maintains the story of our life , and it 's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question , " How have you been feeling lately ? " 
or " How was your trip to Albania ? " or something like that . 
Those are two very different entities , the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness . 
Now , the remembering self is a storyteller . 
And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately . 
We don 't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories . 
Our memory tells us stories , that is , what we get to keep from our experiences is a story . 
And let me begin with one example . 
This is an old study . 
Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure . 
I won 't go into detail . It 's no longer painful these days , but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s . 
They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds . 
And here are two patients . 
Those are their recordings . 
And you are asked , " Who of them suffered more ? " 
And it 's a very easy question . 
Clearly , Patient B suffered more . 
His colonoscopy was longer , and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more . 
But now there is another question : " How much did these patients think they suffered ? " 
And here is a surprise : And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. 
The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends -- and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... 
but one of them is distinctly worse than the other . 
And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end . 
It 's a bad story . 
How do we know that ? 
Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy , and much later , too , " How bad was the whole thing , in total ? " 
and it was much worse for A than for B in memory . 
Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self . 
From the point of view of the experiencing self , clearly , B had a worse time . 
Now , what you could do with patient A , and we actually ran clinical experiments , and it has been done , and it does work , you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much . 
That will cause the patient to suffer , but just a little and much less than before . 
And if you do that for a couple of minutes , you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off , and you have the remembering self of Patient A and lot better off , because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience . 
What defines a story ? 
And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us , and it 's also true of the stories that we make up . 
What defines a story are changes , significant moments and endings . 
Endings are very , very important and , in this case , the ending dominated . 
Now , the experiencing self lives its life continuously . 
It has moments of experience , one after the other . 
And you ask : What happens to these moments ? 
And the answer is really straightforward . 
They are lost forever . 
I mean , most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated -- you know , the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long . 
Which means that , you know , in a life there , are about 600 million of them . 
In a month , there are about 600,000 . 
Most of them don 't leave a trace . 
Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self . 
And yet , some how you get the sense that they should count , that what happens during these moments of experience is our life . 
It 's the finite resource that we 're spending while we 're on this earth . 
And how to spend it , would seem to be relevant , but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us . 
So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self , and they 're really quite distinct . 
The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time . 
From the point of view of the experiencing self , if you have a vacation , and the second week is just as good as the first , then the two week vacation is twice as good as the one week vacation . 
That 's not the way it works at all for the remembering self . 
For the remembering self , a two week vacation is barely better than the one week vacation because there are no new memories added . 
You have not changed the story . 
And in this way , time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self . 
Time has very little impact on this story . 
Now , the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories . 
It is actually the one that makes decisions because , if you have a patient who has had , say , two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose , then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad , and that 's the surgeon that will be chosen . 
The experiencing self has no voice in this choice . 
We actually don 't choose between experiences . 
we choose between memories of experiences . 
And , even when we think about the future , we don 't think of our future normally as experiences . 
We think of our future as anticipated memories . 
And basically you can look at this , you know , as a tyranny of the remembering self , and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn 't need . 
I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case , that is , we go on vacations , to a very large extent , in the service of our remembering self . 
And this is a bit hard to justify I think . 
I mean , how much do we consume our memories ? 
That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self . 
And when I think about that , I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago , which was clearly the best vacation I 've ever had , and I think of it relatively often , relative to how much I think of other vacations . 
And I probably have consumed my memories of that three week trip , I would say , for about 25 minutes in the last four years . 
Now , if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it , I would have spent another hour . 
Now , that is three weeks , and that is at most an hour and a half . 
There seems to be a discrepancy . 
Now , I may be a bit extreme , you know , in how little appetite I have for consuming memories , but even if you do more of this , there is a genuine question . 
Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences ? 
So I want you to think about a thought experiment . 
Imagine that your next vacation you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed , and you 'll get an amnesic drug so that you won 't remember anything . 
Now , would you choose the same vacation ? 
And if you would choose a different vacation , there is a conflict between your two selves , and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict , and it 's actually not at all obvious because , if you think in terms of time , then you get one answer . 
And if you think in terms of memories , you might get another answer . 
Why do we pick the vacations we do , is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves . 
Now , the two selves bring up two notions of happiness . 
There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply , one per self . 
So you can ask : How happy is the experiencing self ? 
And then you would ask : How happy are the moments in the experiencing self 's life ? 
And they 're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process . 
What are the emotions that can be measured ? 
And , by the way , now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time . 
If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self , it 's a completely different thing . 
This is not about how happily a person lives . 
It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life . 
Very different notion . 
Anyone who doesn 't distinguish those notions , is going to mess up the study of happiness , and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being , who 've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way . 
The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years , and there are now efforts to measure the two separately , the Gallup Organization has a world poll with more that half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences . 
And there have been other efforts along those lines . 
So in recent years , we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves . 
And the main lesson I think that we have learned , is they are really different . 
You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life , and that really doesn 't teach you much about how happily they 're living their life , and vice versa . 
Just to give you a sense of the correlation , the correlation is about .5 . 
What that means is if you met somebody , and you were told , oh his father is six feet tall , how much would you know about his height ? 
Well , you would know something about his height , but there 's a lot of uncertainty . 
You have that much uncertainty . 
If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten , you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self . 
So the correlation is low . 
We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self . 
We know that money is very important , goals are very important . 
We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like , spending time with people that we like . 
There are other pleasures , but this is dominant . 
So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves , you are going to end up doing very different things . 
The bottom line of what I 've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being . 
It is a completely different notion . 
Now , very quickly , another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life , and we actually live . 
So , if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California , you are not going to get to the correct answer . 
When you ask that question , you think people must be happier in California , if , say , you live in Ohio . 
And what happens is when you think about living in California , you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places , and that contrast , say , is in climate . 
Well , it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and is not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are . 
But now , because the reflective self is in charge , you may end up -- some people may end up moving to California . 
And it 's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier . 
Well , their experiencing self is not going to get happier . 
We know that . 
But one thing will happen . They will think they are happier , because , when they think about it , they 'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio . 
And they will feel they made the right decision . 
It is very difficult to think straight about well-being , and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is . 
Thank you . 
Thank you . I 've got a question for you . 
Thank you so much . 
Now , when we were on the phone a few weeks ago , you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey . 
Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now ? 
Sure . 
I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number , which we absolutely did not expect to find . 
We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self . 
When we looked at how feelings vary with income . 
And it turns out that , below an income of 60,000 dollars a year , for Americans , and that 's a very large sample of Americans , like 600,000 , but it 's a large representative sample , below an income of 600,000 dollars a year ... 
60,000 . 
60,000 . 
60,000 dollars a year , people are unhappy , and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get . 
Above that , we get an absolutely flat line . 
I mean I 've rarely seen lines so flat . 
Clearly , what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness , but lack of money certainly buys you misery , and we can measure that misery very , very clearly . 
In terms of the other self , the remembering self , you get a different story . 
The more money you earn the more satisfied you are . 
That does not hold for emotions . 
But Danny , the whole American endeavor is about life , liberty , the pursuit of happiness . 
If people took seriously that finding , I mean , it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about , say for example , taxation policy and so forth . 
Is there any chance that politicians , that the country generally , would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it ? 
You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy . 
The recognition is going to be slow in the United States , no question about that , but in the UK , it is happening , and in other countries it is happening . 
People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy . 
It 's going to take awhile , and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness , or whether they want to study life evaluation , so we need to have that debate fairly soon , How to enhance happiness , goes very different ways depending on how you think , and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self . 
This is going to influence policy , I think , in years to come . 
In the United States , efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population . 
This is going to be , I think , within the next decade or two , part of national statistics . 
Well , it seems to me , this issue will , or at least should be , the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years . 
Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics . 
Thank you Danny Kahneman . 
