Transcript

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's.

The first of these trap is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply 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 a 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, it's 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.