Insight From "The Most Important Psychologist Alive Today"

This is a short interview with David Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in Economics despite being a psychologist, by Sam Adams.  David Kahneman is "The most important psychologist alive today" according to David Pinker, who himself is no slouch with regard to the human mind.

The entire interview is packed with useful information if you want to know how and why people do things.  However, this is the bit that most interested me.

 I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness. I eventually concluded that this view is not tenable, for one simple reason: people seem to be much more concerned with the satisfaction of their goals than with the achievement of experienced happiness....

... There is a road to convergence, but few will want to take it:  we could suggest to people that they should adopt experienced happiness as their main goal, and be satisfied with their lives to the extent that this goal is achieved. This idea implies the abandonment of other goals and values, which is surely unappealing.

So, one of the foremost scientific experts on human happiness states that there are two sorts of happiness, experienced happiness and life satisfaction.  Experienced happiness is how happy you feel from moment to moment, and life satisfaction is how satisfied you feel about your life, usually how well you feel you have met your goals.  It is asserted that these are essentially irreconcilable, that since they use different methods and standards you will get different results.

However, a solution is given, that experienced happiness be your goal.  That is that your life's goal is to experience happiness from moment to moment as best you can.  Kahneman correctly states that people don't do this, in fact their goals are given greater priority than their experienced happiness.  For most people it is more important to feel satisfied with what you have done than to have felt good while you were doing it.  Does this not seem largely accurate, and yet really weird?

However, what Kahneman is describing, this synthesis of life's goals and experiential happiness, is exactly what the philosophies/religions of Asia are all about.  The major psychological goals of over half the world's civilizations by population have been this precise goal, the one that seems untenable to almost all of us, and even to such an esteemed psychologist.

I think I was sixteen when I decided that the important thing in life was to be happy.  To be happy has been my goal, and any other goals I have had have really been about being happy.  I haven't done particularly well at it, but I don't feel bad about that, and I feel quite happy right now.  My goal for tomorrow is to be happy.  The same thing for next week, next year, next decade...

Is deciding that your life's goal is to be happy from moment to moment, as best you can, untenable for you?  Is abandoning your other goals and values unappealing?