We all know that when you’re having fun, time seems to go faster. And conversely, when you are bored or having a really bad time, time can seem to drag on and on.
You could, if you wished, achieve the experience of living a longer life by always being bored. In practice, this isn’t a very good strategy, because what’s the point of life if you can’t enjoy it?
But maybe there is the germ of a good idea there. What if your level of happiness and your level of subjective time passing don’t change in the same way? In particular, maybe we can maximize the following product, added up over all the moments of your life:
Subjective Enjoyment (SE) =
(subjective duration of each moment) ×
(level of happiness at that moment)
For instance, let’s say that at some level of happiness A, time seems to go at a rapid rate TA, and at some lower level of happiness B, time seems to go at a slower rate TB.
Consider the level of happiness half way between A and B. What if time at that level of happiness seems to goes by more slowly than the average of TA and TB?
In that case, you can achieve a greater total lifetime SE score by hovering near this average state.
In fact, if we could measure both subjective happiness and subjective rate of time passing on a linear scale, we might be able to compute an optimal state of happiness, to best make you feel as though you’ve lived a long and satisfying life.
But don’t get too excited about this. If you get too happy, you might end up with a shorter subjective lifetime. 😉
that last paragraph made me laugh. nice post.
Thank you!
I fear you might run into an uncertainty principle kind of problem here. As soon as you start thinking about your own happiness, it will change. Besides that, describing happiness on a linear scale probably has the same issues as pain scales have. People apply different standards.
So I propose:
Subjective Enjoyment (SE) = enjoyment of the moment – (amount of mental preoccupation + rational evaluation of the moment)
Hmm, interesting thought. Once you begin to have this more sophisticated view of the situation, I wonder whether you would need to distinguish between (1) rational evalution of the moment and (2) rational evaluation of rational evaluation of the moment.
😉
A deadlock of thoughts. Not uncommon in my brain 😉