Optimally Irrational
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. […] There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. - Kundera (1984)
There are two ways to interpret Kundera’s dilemma. One interpretation is that happiness is elusive: we don’t know what will make us happy (e.g., a high income or a meaningful job?). 1 The other interpretation is that we know what would make us happy but are uncertain about how to achieve it (e.g., when choosing between job offers). In this post, I discuss how the modern science of happiness can help us answer these questions and address Kundera’s dilemma.
Positive and negative hedonic feelings can be understood as signals meant to guide our decisions. From this perspective, our hedonic system—the cognitive processes that produce these signals—has been shaped by evolution for us to increase our fitness by following these cues. This idea is widely accepted in behavioural sciences. For example, how Kahneman described the role of pleasure and pain as follows:
