Daniel Kahneman

It's not satisfaction.

It's life satisfaction.

That thought had never occurred to me.

When I began to work on this, I started out thinking that happiness, in that sense of how you feel when you live, that that was reality and that life satisfaction was just stories that people tell themselves.

The important thing was to be happy in real time.

But later, when we did more research, it turned out that the circumstances that make people happy and the circumstances that make them satisfied with their life are not the same.

So happiness is mostly social.

It's being with people you love and who love you back.

That's a lot of what happiness is.

Life satisfaction is much more conventional.

It's to be successful.

And, you know, so it's money, education, prestige, that sort of thing is what life satisfaction is about.

So those are two very different things.

I thought that life satisfaction is irrelevant.

You know, that's how I began.

And we had a research program where we were trying to, you know, to show that this is the case.

But then, after a few years, I realized that what people really want in their life is they don't seem to care about how happy they'll be.

They seem to want to be satisfied with their life.

They seem to want to have a good story about their life.

And then I was in the position of saying that