The Distortion of Happiness

I have the research to prove it. In 1997, psychologists followed people through three separate trips. An experience in Europe. A thanksgiving get away. And a three-week bicycle experience across California. They wanted to know what people expected before the trip. How they felt in the process of the experience. And what they remember when it was over. The results were absurd. The psychologists identified three things for every experience. Rosy projection, dampening and rosy retrospection. But most of the travellers rated the trip far more positively in memory than they ever did when they were going through it. Rosy retrospection took over their brains. They forgot all the disappointments. What they remembered was how wonderful it all was. “Expectations beat the experience. The recollection also beat the experience. The lived middle section was the low point on the graph, every time,” writes Alana Adamson.

Novelist and playwright Marcel Pagnol once said, “The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.”

What Pagnol observed is the three mental biases that run on autopilot, one after another, in your mind and mine, every day. For most people (unless they have a strong negative bias), the brain tends to remember past experiences more fondly than they felt at the time. Your brain stores fragments of experiences and reconstructs them each time you remember. Over time, that reconstruction becomes more positive than the original experience. Of course, this doesn’t apply if you’ve been through a terrible trauma in life. You can’t pretend it wasn’t bad. But you shouldn’t allow it to stop you from making the most of the rest of your life. But for all the things we plan and look forward to, negative details fade. Boring things disappear.

The discomfort doesn’t stay long in your head. What remains is a great experience of the past, normally better than what happened.

This habit can become a trap.

A way of life that takes you away from the present.

You stay too long in your head.

I like what Alan Watts said. “If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.” You are not living now if you are consistently stuck in your head comparing now to a memory that has been improved by time. The present never gets the benefit of memory.

That’s why people think it’s worse.

Or all bad. Reality has all the things you don’t want to face or do. It feels worse than it is. Forgetting is yet to happen. So you get attached and interpret it as suffering. But is it? I recently visited Amsterdam for the first time. Right now all I think is that I have to go back again. It was one of the best short experiences of my adult life.

Am I enjoying the benefit of “brain editing?

I probably am.

The hotel experience wasn’t great. But I loved my time out there. Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, describes the mind as a machine that always distorts what it sees. “Our experiences instantly become part, present, and future,” he writes, “and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see.” You experience the present through the lens of what you expected, what you remembered, and what you are afraid of. And that lens is rarely kind to the right now.

How about what it does to the future?

You take the present, which you already see as worse than it is, and you project it forward. Gilbert again says, “When scientists make erroneous predictions they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present.” You imagine tomorrow as today with a twist. If today is the worst day of your life, tomorrow is likely to feel like a burden. If today feels stuck, the future looks like a longer version of stuck. So the future feels unresolved. You forget you are using a distorted present as your blueprint. There is a time in a lot of people’s lives when this becomes obvious. You get the thing you wanted. The promotion you wanted, a house of your own. And for a week, maybe two, it feels good. Then the feeling goes away. You get back to your normal feeling. Things reset. You start looking at the next thing. The present, once again, is not enough.

This is not all your fault.

It’s how we are wired.

Your brain notices what is wrong, what is missing, what could go wrong next, more. It doesn’t make you happy. But it keeps you vigilant. And vigilance, sustained over a long time, feels a lot like unhappiness. You can’t be in that state of mind all the time. You will go insane. So what do you do with this? You can’t fix this mindset by forcing yourself to be positive. That doesn’t work. You can’t pretend the past was not good or the present is perfect. That is just lying to yourself in a different direction. What you can do is notice the distortion. If you catch yourself thinking that things used to be better, don’t stop there. Better how? Specifically. Name three things about that past time that were hard, boring, or painful. You will find them. They are there. Your memory just didn’t value them. When you catch yourself thinking that the present is worse than it is, get back a better question. Compared to what? Compared to a memory that has been edited? Compared to a future that has not happened?

The present is the only thing you have.

It is not perfect. It never will be. But it is more real than both the past and the imagined future combined. And when the future feels like the worry will never end, remember that every future you have ever worried about has already become a present you survived. The future resolves itself. Not always the way you wanted. But it does become the present you transcend. Don’t just think of the future as a maze of unresolved problems, open questions, and impending doom. You are forgetting your own capacity for adaptation. Take into account your skill and resilience. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Life moves like a pendulum backwards and forward between pain and boredom.”

Pagnol was right.

The past is not as good as you remember. The present is not as bad as it feels. The future is not as unresolved as it looks. The gap between those three distortions and reality is your unhappiness. No wonder happiness feels like trying to hold water. Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

That is the whole problem of life in a single quote.

You measure your present against an impossible standard in your head. When reality delivers what you didn’t expect, you assume something has gone wrong with your life. Most of your unhappiness is caused by what you are comparing what is happening to. But you can’t close that gap by trying harder to be happy. You can only see it clearly. With a better mindset. Clarity, it turns out, is a lot more useful than forced joy. The only way to make sense of the present is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality,” says philosopher Lao Tzu. Your mind has a memory problem. If you can see through that, you will take back control of your life. The present is the only place you can live. You might as well see it clearly. That won’t make you happy every day. But it will stop you from making yourself unhappy by default.