In a 2018 conversation, economists Tyler Cowen and Daniel Kahneman had the following exchange re: part of Kahneman’s research:
COWEN: You also have a paper on happiness with Alan Krueger, using what you call the Day Reconstruction Method — how much people enjoy different experiences. One result from that paper is how much people enjoy spending time with their friends. If that’s so much more enjoyable at the margin, why don’t people do more of it?
KAHNEMAN: Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense. And that’s one of the reasons that I actually left the field of happiness, in that I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daniel-kahneman/
We don’t seem to want to maximize happiness. We actually want to maximize satisfaction with ourselves and with our lives.
There’s nothing particularly negative about the idea of “satisfaction.” Companies often tout the idea of how they apparently excel in “customer satisfaction,” after all. But you can see, when juxtaposed with the notion of happiness, that these are two very different concepts.
It can be hard to know what will make us happy. But I think we should fight for happiness (or even a step further, joy) rather than settling for mere satisfaction. The latter may be more useful for signaling purposes, but at our core what we want and need is the former.
Meaningful Returns 