Iris Mauss

So it was a particularly big one.

And a lot of people had really high expectations for what the big millennial New Year's Eve celebration would bring.

And they asked people ahead of time how happy they expected to be and how much time they spent planning for the New Year's Eve celebration.

First on, they found that 83% of people were actually disappointed with the celebration.

And then the second really interesting thing that they found is that the more enjoyment participants expected having, the more disappointed they actually ended up being.

So it's not like greater expectation and working more toward...

enjoying the party would pay off with greater enjoyment.

Actually, the exact opposite happened.

More expectation, less enjoyment.

That's exactly what they found.

checking how happy we are is very much so bound up with thinking that happiness is an important thing.

And it's also something that we do, I think, very automatically.

In all of the examples, I think, that I gave from my own life, it's very much so that we

the moment I checked in on how happy am I, how is this going, that's when I realized, oh, actually, I'm not quite as happy as I hoped to be.

And various studies allude to

that or have examined that relationship between what's called experiences, hedonic experiences and metaconsciousness.

So that sort of overlay of being self-consciously aware

of how we're feeling.

One domain of research where this has been examined is in the research of flow.

And this is research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.