Well-being

Well-being is not a single verdict about whether a life has gone well. It has at least two distinguishable dimensions: the feelings people undergo as they live through their days and the judgment they later make when evaluating their lives as a whole. The study of well-being therefore shifts attention from the remembering self’s global assessment to the experiencing self’s succession of concrete moments, while ultimately recognizing that neither perspective can simply replace the other.

Definition and the Two Selves

Well-being initially appears in the familiar question, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” That question addresses the remembering self, which reconstructs a life and forms an overall evaluation. Experienced well-being asks a different question: what was it actually like to inhabit the day, episode by episode? The distinction became especially important because earlier work on mistaken memories of colonoscopies and painfully cold hands had shown that retrospective reports could be unreliable witnesses to momentary experience.

The experiencing self’s happiness can therefore be described in temporal rather than purely evaluative terms. A person such as Helen would count as happy during a month if most of her time was spent in activities she would rather continue than stop, relatively little time was spent in situations she wished to escape, and not too much time passed in emotionally neutral states. This definition treats attention, pleasure, absorption, aversion, and interruption as evidence about lived quality. Total absorption in a task, the state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, is a clear example: artists, readers, film viewers, and people solving crossword puzzles may resist interruption because the activity itself is rewarding. Childhood memories of crying when play was interrupted similarly illustrate how resistance to being pulled away can reveal enjoyment.

The distinction does not mean that life satisfaction is simply a defective measure. The initial suspicion that the remembering self was merely an error-prone witness proved too extreme. Global evaluation and experienced well-being are related, but they answer different questions. Life satisfaction is not a failed version of experienced well-being; it is a separate form of judgment, shaped by the remembering self’s assessment of the life as a whole.

Measuring Lived Experience

A continuous record of experience would be impossible because people could not live normally while reporting their feelings at every moment. A research team assembled from psychologists with different specialties and an economist therefore developed practical approximations. Experience sampling interrupts people at random intervals, now commonly through a cell phone that beeps or vibrates and asks what the respondent was doing, who was present, and how intensely she felt happiness, tension, anger, worry, engagement, physical pain, and other states.

Because experience sampling is expensive and burdensome, the team developed the Day Reconstruction Method. Participants first relive the previous day in detail, dividing it into episodes like scenes in a film. They then identify the activities in each episode, indicate which activity received most of their attention, list the people who were with them, and rate several feelings on separate scales from 0, the absence of a feeling, to 6, its greatest intensity. The method relies on evidence that people who can retrieve a past situation in detail can often relive the feelings associated with it, including earlier physiological signs of emotion.

Several comparisons with experience sampling supported the validity of the Day Reconstruction Method. Since participants reported when episodes began and ended, researchers could calculate a duration-weighted profile of feeling across the waking day: a long episode counted more than a short one. The questionnaire also included life-satisfaction measures, allowing the researchers to compare the emotional well-being of the experiencing self with the satisfaction judgment of the remembering self. The method was used with several thousand women in the United States, France, and Denmark, turning the texture of ordinary time into material for systematic comparison.

Emotions, Distress, and the U-Index

A moment cannot be represented adequately by one undifferentiated happiness score. Positive feelings include love, joy, engagement, hope, and amusement, while negative emotions include anger, shame, depression, and loneliness. Because positive and negative feelings may coexist, an episode was classified as unpleasant when a negative feeling received a higher rating than every positive feeling. By this measure, American women spent about 19 percent of their time in an unpleasant state, compared with 16 percent for French women and 14 percent for Danish women.

The proportion of time spent in such a state became the U-index. Unlike a rating scale, the U-index is based on time. Someone who spent four hours of a sixteen-hour waking day in an unpleasant state would have a U-index of 25 percent. The measure also permits population-level interpretation: if a population’s U-index fell from 20 percent to 18 percent, the total time spent in emotional discomfort or pain would have declined by one-tenth.

The distribution of suffering was sharply unequal. About half of the participants reported an entire day without an unpleasant episode, while a significant minority experienced substantial distress for much of the day. A relatively small fraction of the population appeared to bear much of the suffering, whether because of physical or mental illness, an unhappy temperament, or misfortune and personal tragedy. The U-index could also be attached to particular activities. Among 1,000 American women in a Midwestern city, it was 29 percent for the morning commute, 27 percent for work, 24 percent for child care, 18 percent for housework, 12 percent for socializing, 12 percent for watching television, and 5 percent for sex. Weekdays produced a U-index about six percentage points higher than weekends, largely because weekends reduced disliked activities and work-related tension.

Social Conditions and Public Measurement

Experienced well-being is sensitive to circumstances that people can sometimes change. Individuals may not be able simply to will themselves into a sunnier disposition, but they may be able to reduce commuting, spend more time with people they like, and replace passive leisure with more active activities such as socializing and exercise. At the policy level, better transportation, accessible child care for working women, and more opportunities for social contact among older people could reduce the U-index. Even a one-percent reduction would represent millions of hours of avoided suffering. Alan Krueger led an effort to bring elements of this approach into national statistics.

The method subsequently expanded beyond small research samples. Measures of experienced well-being became part of large-scale surveys in the United States, Canada, and Europe, while the Gallup World Poll collected reports about emotions experienced during the previous day from millions of people in the United States and more than 150 countries. Although these reports were less detailed than the Day Reconstruction Method, their enormous samples allowed fine-grained analysis and confirmed the importance of situations, physical health, and social contact. A headache can make a person miserable, and one of the strongest predictors of how a day feels is whether the person had contact with friends or relatives. Happiness, in this empirical sense, is closely bound to spending time with people one loves and who love one in return.

The findings also expose the unequal burden of hardship. Severe poverty magnifies the experienced effects of illness, divorce, and loneliness. Among people in the upper two-thirds of the income distribution, a headache increased the proportion reporting sadness and worry from 19 percent to 38 percent; among the poorest tenth, the corresponding increase was from 38 percent to 70 percent. The weekend also brought substantially less relief to the very poor than to most others. Experienced well-being is thus not merely an inner disposition: material conditions alter both the baseline of distress and the force with which further misfortunes are felt.

Income, Evaluation, and Significance

Experienced well-being reached a satiation point at a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas, potentially less where living costs were lower. Beyond that level, the average increase in experienced well-being was precisely zero, even though higher income could purchase vacations, opera tickets, and improved surroundings. One possible explanation is that wealth may reduce sensitivity to small pleasures; suggestive evidence came from an experiment in which priming students with the idea of wealth reduced the pleasure expressed on their faces while eating chocolate.

Income nevertheless continued to improve life satisfaction well beyond the point at which it ceased to improve everyday emotional experience. This divergence is the central significance of well-being research. A society or individual concerned with remembered success may pursue income and status, while a society concerned with lived experience must also examine health, social contact, commuting, work, care, loneliness, and the distribution of unpleasant time. The practical objective is therefore not simply to produce higher life evaluations, but to reduce human suffering and lower the U-index, with depression and extreme poverty treated as priorities.