MISCONCEPTION: You are one
person, and your happiness is based
on being content with your life.

THE TRUTH: You are multiple
selves, and happiness is based on satisfying
all of them.

A Thought experiment: Imagine you are preparing
to go on a two-week vacation.
At the
end of this vacation, you will drink a potion
that will erase all the memories from those
two weeks.
How will this affect your decisions?
Knowing you won’t remember any of it,
what will you spend your time doing during those two
weeks?
That weird feeling you are having
thinking about this is the conflict between
your experiencing self and your remembering self.

The experiencing self can easily
choose what to do. Sex, skiing, restaurants,
concerts, parties—all of these things are
about being happy during the event.
The remembering self is not so sure.
It would
rather go to Ireland and look at castles or
drive from New York to Los Angeles just to
see what happens.

This research suggests there are
two channels through which you decide
whether or not you are happy. The current
self is happy when experiencing nice things.
The remembering self is happy when you
look back on your life and pull up plenty of
positive memories. As this points out,
a two-week vacation may yield only a hand-
ful of lifelong memories. You will pull those
memories out every once and a while and use
them to be happy. There is a serious imbal-
ance between the time you spend creating
these memories and the time you spend enjoying them later.

The current self doesn’t like sitting in a cubicle. It feels caged. It could be doing
something fun.

The remembering self
doesn’t like not having the opportunity to
build new memories, so it is willing to grind
away to earn money for food and shelter and
delay gratification

Life for you and many others is full of conflict
between these two selves over how best
to be happy.

This research shows
that happiness can’t be all one or all the other.

You have to be happy in the flow of time
while simultaneously creating memories you
can look back on later.
To be happy now and content later, you
can’t be focused only on reaching goals, because once you reach them, the experience
ends.

To truly be happy, you must satisfy
both of your selves.

Go get the ice cream, but
do so in a meaningful way that creates a
long-term memory.

Grind away to have
money for later, but do so in a way that generates happiness as you work.