James' World 2

Key points

• The shortest definition of well-being is to like one’s life.
• A good life doesn’t always feel good.
• Your values are more negotiable than you think.
• We rank being morally good above feeling good. Our life satisfaction measures disagree.

 

The Norwegian town of Tromsø is home to the usual delights of a typical northern European city, and a few others one might expect of a place 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. For example, from late November to mid-January, the sun never rises here. At the nearby UiT The Arctic University of Norway – the world’s northernmost university – psychologist Joar Vittersø has been studying the science of well-being for over 40 years. I asked him whether the winter’s veil of darkness affects him. Yes, he said, positively.

There’s much to like about polar night season – the snow, the beauty, the coziness of a slower pace, the contrast with what will follow. And for the negative elements, there’s adaptation. In fact, that people continue to be surprised by how readily they get used to things is among Vittersø’s own biggest surprises. Another of his insights is about the process of scientific progress. Human nature reveals itself gradually and knowledge is accrued “stone by stone.” Thankfully, “there’s an infinity to knowledge,” always something new to discover. This is good news for all of us – it keeps the well of engagement, interest and hope perpetually full.

According to Vittersø, the shortest definition of well-being is to like one’s life. You have to like it hedonically, with all its joys and pleasures and satisfaction they bring, but also eudaimonically, for the opportunities it offers for growth and becoming a better person. And if the good life remains elusive, Vittersø thinks that might be partly due to our idealized fantasies of “true happiness” as something “extremely intense, rare and beautiful.” If that’s your idea, then you will be disappointed, he says, because emotions – whichever affective pole they lean towards – don’t last forever. Things are always in motion. Just like life under the northern skies of Tromsø, light and darkness take turns with their visits.Here is Vittersø with five counterintuitive findings from the science of well-being.

1. A good life doesn’t always feel good.

This is surprising at first glance, but if you ask people how much sadness they would like in their perfect life, very few say zero – it’s somewhere between 1% and 5%. There are situations where happiness is simply not the appropriate response. We not only need negative feelings, but we also want them to some degree (but not too much). For example, we know that without one of the most intense negative feelings, namely pain, we wouldn’t survive. Pain is a signal that something is hurting us, and we need to deal with it. So, upon reflection, people realize that a good life is not the complete absence of negative feelings. We don’t only want happiness – we want a variety of emotions. Anything meaningful, like goals and relationships, requires effort and includes challenges.

2. Your values are more negotiable than you think.

Values are very complex. We have many of them, and we need them, but we can’t hold all of them in our attention at the same time. Thus, we organize them hierarchically, so that we can concentrate on particular values while doing our tasks. But if something else needs our attention – our child is crying or the fire alarm goes off – then the whole hierarchy reorders itself in a split second. I think that’s a very functional way for a mental system like the human brain to organize values: what matters most depends on the situation. It is important to remind ourselves about our values if we are tempted towards breaking them. Some values are moral: they oblige us to do things because they are right, not because they make us emotionally happy. I think the advice to “be true to your values” is about those we have reason to value – the values we agree about upon reflection. They are not necessarily identical to those that spontaneously come to mind.

3. Our lives are complex. Yet, we can spontaneously evaluate how satisfied we are with them.

When you ask people how satisfied they are with their lives, almost everyone can come up with an answer in a few seconds. Yet, we often struggle with simple everyday judgments, like which clothes to buy. But the notion of “life satisfaction” refers to an “all things considered” evaluation of your life as a whole, and surprisingly enough, we are able to make such judgments quickly and easily.

My theory is that this helps us survive. Judgements of good or bad come spontaneously, because we can’t stand there forever wondering whether a dangerous situation is good or bad. That capacity has evolved for a reason, and we are quite good at it. Life satisfaction responses resonate with many valuable things in life – but not all of them.

4. We rank being morally good above feeling good. Yet, our life satisfaction measures seem to dis

Over the last years, I’ve asked participants in at least 15 different samples: If you had to choose between being a morally good person and being satisfied with your life, which is more important for you? In every study, 80 to 90 percent say being a morally good person. But when we ask about how morally good you would be in your perfect life versus how good you actually behave, most people have a gap. And you would predict that a big gap between your ideal and your current life would reduce life satisfaction. It hardly does. Hedonic gaps, however, affect us strongly.

I think one explanation is that life satisfaction comes from a spontaneous good-bad evaluation, while morality is determined by a right-wrong rationality. Including it requires us to pause and reflect on what we mean by “goodness.” That is enough to keep morality out of the spontaneous judgment, even if you personally think of it as an important value.

5. The good life is harder to measure than happiness surveys suggest.

The hedonic part of a good life is easy to measure but the eudaimonic elements are difficult. The essence of eudaimonia, to keep developing our human potential, doesn’t reveal itself easily in a survey. Yet, to understand the good life, we need both.