EXPERIENCE VERSUS MEMORY
IN TERMS OF HAPPINESS
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You can be "happy in your life" and/or you can be "happy with your life".
I'll explain what these mean.
Which is more important?:
1. The experience of being happy in the moment, which will disappear after the moment (unless it is significant enough to be remembered)
or
2. Recalling that you are happy with (about) your life.
As I look at it, it makes sense that having the notion in our brain that we are happy with our lives and with ourselves is more powerful, as it is repeatable, since it comes from our memory and can be accessed any time.
Of course, I can add more happy moments, besides thinking of myself as capable and having a good life, by intentionally bringing those moments back up, such as reviewing the Memory Notebook or even in reflection about life, such as is done in life planning. If I recall that I had a good experience, I again experience my experience (such as a trip or a nice romance). That's good! It's a "quickie" with good positive impact on feeling good!
In the context of overall life, I purport that our happiness is the sum total of accumulated happiness units. Although I may have a happy moment, it disappears and it no longer exists - and thus is not saved up in the accumulated happiness bin. For the moment, if we equate meaning with value (if we don't value something it does not have positive meaning, of course!), each happiness experience equals the number of value units. If we keep those in our memory (or some of them), then we accumulate them, for later reexperiencing in some way. And that accumulated value is, I purport, equal to "enduring, deep happiness". (It is enduring since we are keeping it around, as opposed to experiences that have disappeared from our lives.) (I write about this in What Is Life About? How To Maximize Happiness In Life.)
A bunch of 'happy' experiences (like eating ice cream) will disappear totally, so they are not part of enduring (accumulated) happiness, other than being a smidgeon of the memory of the idea that you had many good experiences in your life.
The strongest contributor to overall happiness, since it is both powerful (many value units) and repeated many, many, many times over life, is the memory (the thought, which causes one to experience the happiness of this) of these two things which I propose as the basis for happiness
1. Feeling good about oneself
Since it seems necessary that we have to have a good opinion of ourself to "feel good about ourselves" and since logical disconnects mostly don't occur in humans, gaining competence over one's life and what is in it would seem to be a major activity that would underlie, and be necessary for, enduring, impactful happiness.
Much of our chatter in our minds, which when repeated becomes stronger and more frequent, is "evaluative" - about how well or badly we did and what that means for future survival Much of the context, interestingly enough, is based on "vague" thoughts which we consider but are totally or mostly not true - we will not be kiccked out of the trbie to suffer and die of starvation or wild animals but we retain a bit of this belief. We will die, yet we spend much of our lives creating experiencing around the fear of dying, as if that will somehow cause it (or we will experience how bad it is to die - but we'll be dead and not experiencing how bad it is because we're either not experiencing at all or we're in heaven and realize that dying wasn't really a problem).
2. Feeling good about one's life and how one has lived it - and about the world and the miracle of it all.
This requires acceptance of imperfections, failures, etc., that are all part of the human existence. This requires appreciation of what one has done, especially if one had to struggle in going forward, and how one has tried to live a better life.
Watch Daniel Kahnemann, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize In Economics (!!!!), The Riddle Of Experience Vs. Memory (20:37), at TED.
