It is a joy and an honor to be here,
I will tell you for the next ten minutes or so something about human well-being.
My research on human well-being
actually involved students at the University of Michigan.
They were interested in a very important question,
why does everybody seem to think that people in California are happier than they are?
And we compared, we tested that, and indeed it is true,
people everywhere including students at Michigan,
believe that people in California are happier.
People in California believe it too,
and isn’t true, they are actually not happier.
And in trying to understand why it is that everybody believes
about happiness something that isn’t so,
we coined a phrase, and the phrase is the focusing illusion.
When people think about living in California
or indeed about anything else in their life it turns out almost anything else.
They tend to focus on what is distinctive, for example, about California.
So when people think about California,
what is distinctive if you live in Michigan or in Ohio
which were the places we compared California to, it’s the weather,
and unquestionably let me tell you if you don’t know it yet, the weather is better there.
And so when you compare and you focus on that difference,
it looks as if it’s very important to live in California
because the weather is better there,
but it turns out that the weather makes very little difference to people’s happiness.
And the focusing illusion which we find,
we find it not only about California,
we find it about wealth, people exaggerate greatly
how much wealth matters to happiness,
it does matter a little,
but it matters much less than people behave and the focusing illusion
can be summarized in a statement that could go into fortune cookie.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is
while you are thinking about it.
And as merely thinking about something
will make you exaggerate its importance in your life,
and it turns out that this applies very widely.
I would like to add too, that when you are worrying about
your well-being or your happiness,
you may think that you have to worry about one person yourself,
but in fact within yourself,
there are two selves that you should be worrying about,
because what we have learned in studying well-being and in studying life,
how people live and how the mind works.
In fact there is an experiencing self and a remembering self,
and the experiencing self is the one -- that the doctor probes,
when the doctor asks you how do you feel now,
or does it hurt here when I touch you now?
You are responding with an experience, with a description of your experience.
Your experiencing self lives in the present, it lives moment-by-moment.
The moments can be quite rich,
they can be quite rich in emotional experience, in cognitive experience.
The remembering self is something else,
the remembering self comes to life if you will when you think about your life
and this is not something that we do all the time.
Occasionally, we stop and we think about our life,
and we look back and we evaluate the story of our life
and the remembering self is a storyteller,
and it maintains what for many people is their most important possession
which is the narrative of their life as it develops,
we are all engaged in the story of our life,
we are all engaged in the effort to make that story a good story in every sense.
It is easy to think about well-being almost exclusively in terms of the remembering self
because whenever you think about your life,
it’s the only one that can talk about your life,
the experiencing self has very little voice.
The experiencing self is what happens moment-to-moment,
when you try to look about a balanced life,
you would want to say that the experiencing self must also have a good life.
And it turns out that this is not trivial because the experiencing self
and the remembering self are made happy to some extent by different things.
The remembering self, which is also the self that keeps score,
that keeps the story and evaluates the story,
the remembering self is concerned with how well you do,
with how well you accomplish your goals.
Among other things, it’s concerned with how much money you are making
or other trappings of success.
The experiencing self seems to be interested in different things
and it is made happy primarily by being with people,
by spending time with people that you like and love.
That seems to be the main determinant of what we call Emotional Happiness.
You can be made miserable by a lot of things,
you can be made miserable by physical pain,
you can be made miserable by psychological pain,
you can be made miserable by being poor;
and indeed we find that when we look at people who are the less fortunate in society,
their remembering self is not satisfied and their experiencing self suffers a lot.
However, your experiencing self cannot be made happy by making much more money,
but now I am telling you some research that we did this year.
It turns out that beyond an income, a household income of $75,000 a year
emotional happiness simply does not increase,
life satisfaction goes on increasing if you make more,
but for emotional happiness it turns out this is enough, less than that is too little.
With that four year emotional happiness focusing on the things that matter emotionally
which are primarily social, primarily people you like,
people you love, that is what matters.
This new view of well-being has some implication
so how people ought to be thinking about their future,
because there are two selves that you want to keep happy.
You do not want exclusively to worry about the story of your life,
you also want a happy life, an emotionally happy life,
it is not always the same thing, there will be trade-offs.
There are occasions when you have to choose between path of ambition
that might make you more satisfied and a path of worrying about family
that might make you emotionally happier,
there will be choices,
it will be difficult to do because you will suffer from the focusing illusion;
anything that you think about you will exaggerate its importance.
But this is the kind of challenge that you,
when you think about your future are thinking on now,
and I wish you luck with it.