TED conferences, you might think, are happy affairs. You get up early, meet the most fascinating people, listen to jaw-dropping talks (each followed by a standing ovation), have deep conversations, and party until dawn – and all of that for four days in a row, safely remote from your usual daily routine. The reality, however, is more complicated. The event is a physical and mental stress test, an emotional rollercoaster ride that challenges you with constant over-stimulation, extreme cross-pollination, and tidal waves of acceptance and rejection as you navigate the social networks in the conference’s “social spaces.” To slightly paraphrase Heidi Klum: “With one group you’re in, with the next group you’re out.” And yet you will never hear anyone who was lucky enough to attend TED come back and not rave about their experience. Why is that? Daniel Kahneman, the mastermind of Behavioral Economics, provided the answer – at TED2010: TEDsters are happy because they expect to be happy. Let me explain, or rather, let Daniel Kahneman explain.
The future as anticipated memories
In his talk, the first of the conference and for me the most memorable, Kahneman sharply distinguished between “being happy in one’s life" and “being happy about one’s life,” and fervently debunked the “myth of the one self.” Instead, he introduced two different modes of “self” – the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. Their notions of happiness can be very different, he stressed, so that happiness cannot just be viewed as a substitute for well-being. The lack of money buys you misery, as Gallup surveys regularly indicate, but an abundance of wealth, as often reported, does not necessarily make you happier. To illustrate his point, Kahneman explained why people relocating to California are reported to be extraordinarily happy – before they even move, their Remembering Self imbues their experience as a happy one, which indeed might make them behave happier and thus infect others with more happiness (Connected co-author Nicholas A. Christakis showed in another TED2010 Talk that happiness, like other emotions, is highly contagious and spreads like wildfire through social networks). While the Experiencing Self is in the moment (and might feel good about it), it is the Remembering Self, the reflective self, that qualifies experiences as memorable experiences. There are 600 million moments in one’s life, Kahneman stated – “the Remembering Self tells us which of these are relevant, meaningful, and worth remembering.” “We choose between memories of experiences,” he concluded; in fact, “we think of the future as anticipated memories.”
It is intriguing to think about the implications of Kahneman’s model for policy-making, business, and also design, especially with regards to product and service experiences. If designers followed Kahneman’s theory, they would design user experiences not only for the Experiencing Self but also for the Remembering Self, which puts experiences into perspective by inferring and deferring. You could also say: the Experiencing Self values usability; the Remembering Self attaches itself to a brand. Users are usually happy when the Remembering Self finds out that its anticipated memories (brand promise) match the Experience Self (user experience). Great brands connect the Remembering Self with the Experiencing Self to make consumers happy, inspire behavior change, and make the world a better place – not a simple feat.
Counting what counts
Speaking of simple, there are other gestalts of happiness: George Whitesides proposed the beauty of simplicity as one. In his definition, “simple components are reliable, repeatable, and predictable” – thus they can be “stacked” to create remarkable systems. “Academics like complexity and emergence. The real world wants simplicity,” he contended, and borrowed some of Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom: “When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”
Simple – in a good way – was also the happiness formula that Chip Conley, founder and CEO of hospitality chain Joie de Vivre, presented: “Wanting what you have divided by having what you want.” Gratitude plus gratification. Conley evoked the principles of Positive Psychology and re-imagined Maslow’s pyramid of needs as a new hierarchy of “survival, success, and transformation,” suggesting that we start “counting what really counts” – intangible values, spiritual fulfillment, and meaning. 90% of business leaders believe in the value of intangibles, Conley remarked, but the way we run our organizations does not yet reflect that – for we rely on myopic models and metrics: Pareto optimality, shareholder value, ROI, and GDP (of which, according to Conley, only 36%, is made up of tangible values). A metric for meaning, anyone? On the macro-economic level, the government of Bhutan has come close by introducing Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a new national currency that attempts to measure “quality of life” and “social progress.” France and other countries have begun adopting it. When will the first company implement its micro-equivalent?
Spiritually present during Conley’s talk was Enrique Peñalosa, who in his three years (1998-2001) as mayor of Colombia’s capital Bogota made “promoting happiness” the main directive of his governance, boosting the common good in a city characterized by vast disparities of wealth. During his tenure, he improved slums, built schools and nurseries, new libraries, and hundreds of parks and other pedestrian spaces. “We live in the post-communism period, in which many have assumed equality as a social goal is obsolete,” he once said. “Although income equality as a concept does not jibe with market economy, we can seek to achieve quality-of-life equality.”
Science and compassion
Quality of life may be a moral obligation not only for elected officials but for all of us. In this vein, Sam Harris, the zealous atheist, in his TED talk proposed a concept of “objective morality” that would make life better for everyone. In his eyes, the separation between science and human values is an illusion; for him there is only a rather artificial division between values and facts. “Belief is the default state,” as fellow TED speaker and professional skeptic Michael Specter, author of the book Denialism, observed. It was ironic though how Harris fell prey to his own convictions; his belief in the universal validity of “facts” is just that – a belief. ”Do the Taliban have any point on physics worth considering?” Harris asked. No. So why do we consider their views on morality? “Certain opinions need to be excluded from the discourse for morality to flourish,” he requested.
This is, frankly, a scary thought. If those scientists who present themselves as naïve believers in absolute, measurable truths were to determine the tenets of a universal morality, this would constitute a tyranny of science, with some very subjective outcomes imposed on the rest of us. Values need to regulate science, not the other way around. The essence of morality is “compassion,” as Schopenhauer put it: respect for the “other” – the other being and his/her values. Morality, per se, is an open concept with myriad interpretations. It needs to remain an ambiguous space that tolerates divergent values and opinions – if it doesn’t, the concept of the “other” will become obsolete. “Difference,” in other words “quality” (and “quality of life”), will fade, and “moral scientists” will fill the void with a regime of a default absolute morality.
But morality is relative, by definition. No one said it better than Oscar Wilde: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”
Sometimes it just takes one true word to make you perfectly happy.
[Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson]
