Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Reply. In the majority of emotions this test is inapplicable; for many of the manifestations are in organs over which we have no voluntary control. Few people in pretending to cry can shed real tears, for example. But, within the limits in which it can be verified, experience corroborates rather than disproves the corollary from our theory, upon which the present objection rests. Every one knows how panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we 'work ourselves up' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw! This is recognized by all psychologists, only they fail to see its full import. Professor Bain writes, for example:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  One final generality about the emotions remains to be noted: They blunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than any other sort of feeling. This is due not only to the general law of 'accommodation' to their stimulus which we saw to obtain of all feelings whatever, but to the peculiar fact that the 'diffusive wave' of reflex effects tends always to become more narrow. It seems as if it were essentially meant to be a provisional arrangement, on the basis of which precise and determinate reactions might arise. The more we exercise ourselves at anything, the fewer muscles we employ; and just so, the oftener we meet an object, the more definitely we think and behave about it; and the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise. The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor think at all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation. The emotions of startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were the result. Now we look on with absolutely no emotion.[435] This tendency to economy in the nerve-paths through which our sensations and ideas discharge, is the basis of all growth in efficiency, readiness, and skill. Where would the general, the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their nerve-currents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keeping up amid their convolutions? But what they gain for practice by this law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling. For the world-worn and experienced man, the sense of pleasure which he gets from the free and powerful flow of thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise, is the only compensation for that freshness of the heart which he once enjoyed. This free and powerful flow means that brain-paths of association and memory have more and more organized themselves in him, and that through them the stimulus is drafted off into nerves which lead merely to the writing finger or the speaking tongue.[436] The trains of intellectual association, the memories, the logical relations, may, however, be voluminous in the extreme. Past emotions may be among the things remembered. The more of all these trains an object can set going in us, the richer our cognitive intimacy with it is. This cerebral sense of richness seems itself to be a source of pleasure, possibly even apart from the euphoria which from time to time comes up from respiratory organs. If there be such a thing as a purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict it to this cerebral sense of abundance and ease, this feeling, as Sir W. Hamilton would call it, of unimpeded and not overstrained activity of thought. Under ordinary conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited state of consciousness. In certain intoxications it becomes exciting, and it may be intensely exciting. I can hardly imagine a more frenzied excitement than that which goes with the consciousness of seeing absolute truth, which characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide drunkenness. Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this deepening sense of insight into truth; and with all of them it may be a 'strong' emotion; but then there also come with it all sorts of strange bodily feelings and changes in the incoming sensibilities. I cannot see my way to affirming that the emotion is independent of these. I will concede, however, that if its independence is anywhere to be maintained, these theoretic raptures seem the place at which to begin the defence.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  An emotional temperament on the one hand, and a lively imagination for objects and circumstances on the other, are thus the conditions, necessary and sufficient, for an abundant emotional life. No matter how emotional the temperament may be, if the imagination be poor, the occasions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be realized, and the life will be pro tanto cold and dry. This is perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of thought should not have too strong a visualizing power. He is less likely to have his trains of meditation disturbed by emotional interruptions. It will be remembered that Mr. Galton found the members of the Royal Society and of the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in visualizing power. If I may speak of myself, I am far less able to visualize now, at the age of 46, than in my earlier years; and I am strongly inclined to believe that the relative sluggishness of my emotional life at present is quite as much connected with this fact as it is with the invading torpor of hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled professional and domestic life. I say this because I occasionally have a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I notice that the emotional commentary, so to call it, is then liable to become much more acute than is its present wont. Charcot's patient, whose case is given above on p. 58 ff., complained of his incapacity for emotional feeling after his optical images were gone. His mother's death, which in former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite cold; largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form no definite visual image of the event, and of the effect of the loss on the rest of the family at home.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  a man in his boyhood once talked with Napoleon, any mention of great men or historical events, battles or thrones, or the whirligig of fortune, or islands in the ocean, will be apt to draw to his lips the incidents of that one memorable interview. If the word tooth now suddenly appears on the page before the reader's eye, there are fifty chances out of a hundred that, if he gives it time to awaken any image, it will be an image of some operation of dentistry in which he has been the sufferer. Daily he has touched his teeth and masticated with them; this very morning he brushed them, chewed his breakfast and picked them; but the rarer and remoter associations arise more promptly because they were so much more intense.[481] A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and our mood. The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. The records of Arctic or African travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughts but those of horror at the malignity of Nature; read at another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on the indomitable power and pluck of man. Few novels so overflow with joyous animal spirits as 'The Three Guardsmen' of Dumas. Yet it may awaken in the mind of a reader depressed with sea-sickness (as the writer can personally testify) a most dismal and woful consciousness of the cruelty and carnage of which heroes like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis make themselves guilty. Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity are, then, all reasons why one representation rather than another should be awakened by the interesting portion of a departing thought. We may say with truth that in the majority of cases the coming representation will have been either habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous . If all these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may predict almost infallibly that that associate of the going thought will form an important ingredient in the coming thought. In spite of the fact, however, that the succession of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeterminism and limited to a few classes whose characteristic quality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it must still be confessed that an immense number of terms in the linked chain of our representations fall outside of all assignable rule. To take the instance of the clock given on

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Here's the same old bed, the same old room, the same old world. The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamental respect, or on the continuity before the mind, of the phenomena compared. And it must not be taken to mean more than these grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed. The past and present selves compared are the same just so far as they are the same, and no farther. A uniform feeling of 'warmth,' of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feeling of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this is what gives them a generic unity, and makes them the same in kind . But this generic unity coexists with generic differences just as real as the unity. And if from the one point of view they are one self, from others they are as truly not one but many selves. And similarly of the attribute of continuity; it gives its own kind of unity to the self—that of mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite phenomenal thing—but it gives not a jot or tittle more. And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like the unbrokenness in an exhibition of 'dissolving views,' in no wise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amount of plurality in other respects. And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal identity goes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotes about our infant years, but we do not appropriate them as we do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency. That child is a foreign creature with which our present self is no more identified in feeling than it is with some stranger's living child to-day. Why? Partly because great time-gaps break up all these early years—we cannot ascend to them by continuous memories; and partly because no representation of how the child felt comes up with the stories. We know what he said and did; but no sentiment of his little body, of his emotions, of his psychic strivings as they felt to him, comes up to contribute an element of warmth and intimacy to the narrative we hear, and the main bond of union with our present self thus disappears. It is the same with certain of our dimly-recollected experiences. We hardly know whether to appropriate them or to disown them as fancies, or things read or heard and not lived through. Their animal heat has evaporated; the feelings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of identity can be decisively cast. Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In the fifth and final type of decision, the feeling that the evidence is all in, and that reason has balanced the books, may be either present or absent. But in either case we feel, in deciding, as if we ourselves by our own wilful act inclined the beam; in the former case by adding our living effort to the weight of the logical reason which, taken alone, seems powerless to make the act discharge; in the latter by a kind of creative contribution of something instead of a reason which does a reason's work. The slow dead heave of the will that is felt in these instances makes of them a class altogether different subjectively from all the three preceding classes. What the heave of the will betokens metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to infer about a will-power distinct from motives, are not matters that concern us yet. Subjectively and phenomenally, the feeling of effort, absent from the former decisions, accompanies these. Whether it be the dreary resignation for the sake of austere and naked duty of all sorts of rich mundane delights, or whether it be the heavy resolve that of two mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet and good, and with no strictly objective or imperative principle of choice between them, one shall forevermore become impossible, while the other shall become reality, it is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an excursion into a lonesome moral wilderness. If examined closely, its chief difference from the three former cases appears to be that in those cases the mind at the moment of deciding on the triumphant alternative dropped the other one wholly or nearly out of sight, whereas here both alternatives are steadily held in view, and in the very act of murdering the vanquished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is making himself lose. It is deliberately driving a thorn into one's flesh; and the sense of inward effort with which the act is accompanied is an element which sets the fourth type of decision in strong contrast with the previous three varieties, and makes of it an altogether peculiar sort of mental phenomenon. The immense majority of human decisions are decisions without effort. In comparatively few of them, in most people, does effort accompany the final act. We are, I think, misled into supposing that effort is more frequent than it is, by the fact that during deliberation we so often have a feeling of how great an effort it would take to make a decision now. Later, after the decision has made itself with ease, we recollect this and erroneously suppose the effort also to have been made then.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  in the statements of the events by others during her abnormal state. "Miss Reynolds died in January, 1854, at the age of sixty-one. On the morning of the day of her death she rose in her usual health, at her breakfast, and superintended household duties. While thus employed she suddenly raised her hands to her head and exclaimed: 'Oh! I wonder what is the matter with my head!' and immediately fell to the floor. When carried to a sofa she gasped once or twice and died." In such cases as the preceding, in which the secondary character is superior to the first, there seems reason to think that the first one is the morbid one. The word inhibition describes its dulness and melancholy. Félida X.'s original character was dull and melancholy in comparison with that which she later acquired, and the change may be regarded as the removal of inhibitions which had maintained themselves from earlier years. Such inhibitions we all know temporarily, when we can not recollect or in some other way command our mental resources. The systematized amnesias (losses of memory) of hypnotic subjects ordered to forget all nouns, or all verbs, or a particular letter of the alphabet, or all that is relative to a certain person, are inhibitions of the sort on a more extensive scale. They sometimes occur spontaneously as symptoms of disease.[310] Now M. Pierre Janet has shown that such inhibitions when they bear on a certain class of sensations (making the subject anæsthetic thereto) and also on the memory of such sensations, are the basis of changes of personality. The anæsthetic and 'amnesic' hysteric is one person; but when you restore her inhibited sensibilities and memories by plunging her into the hypnotic trance—in other words, when you rescue them from their 'dissociated' and split-off condition, and make them rejoin the other sensibilities and memories—she is a different person. As said above (p. 137), the hypnotic trance is one method of restoring sensibility in hysterics. But one day when the hysteric anæsthetic named Lucie was already in the hypnotic trance, M. Janet for a certain reason continued to make passes over her for a full half-hour as if she were not already asleep. The result was to throw her into a sort of syncope from which, after half an hour, she revived in a second somnambulic condition entirely unlike that which had characterized her thitherto—different sensibilities, a different memory, a different person, in short. In the waking state the poor young woman was anæsthetic all over, nearly deaf, and with a badly contracted field of vision. Bad as it was, however, sight was her best sense, and she used it as a guide in all her movements. With her eyes bandaged she became entirely helpless, and like other persons of a similar sort whose cases have been recorded, she almost immediately fell asleep in consequence of the withdrawal of her last sensorial stimulus. M. Janet calls this waking or primary (one can hardly in

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  only. The longer the interval of time between the sensations, the more uncertain is their discrimination. The difference, thus immediately felt between two terms, is independent of our ability to identify either of the terms by itself. I can feel two distinct spots to be touched on my skin, yet not know which is above and which below. I can observe two neighboring musical tones to differ, and still not know which of the two is the higher in pitch. Similarly I may discriminate two neighboring tints, whilst remaining uncertain which is the bluer or the yellower, or how either differs from its mate.[414] With such direct perceptions of difference as this, we must not confound those entirely unlike cases in which we infer that two things must differ because we know enough about each of them taken by itself to warrant our classing them under distinct heads. It often happens, when the interval is long between two experiences, that our judgments are guided, not so much by a positive image or copy of the earlier one, as by our recollection of certain facts about it. Thus I know that the sunshine to-day is less bright than on a certain day last week, because I then said it was quite dazzling, a remark I should not now care to make. Or I know myself to feel better now than I was last summer, because I can now psychologize, and then I could not. We are constantly busy comparing feelings with whose quality our imagination has no sort of acquaintance at the time—pleasures, or pains, for example. It is notoriously hard to conjure up in imagination a lively image of either of these classes of feeling. The associationists may prate of an idea of pleasure being a pleasant idea, of an idea of pain being a painful one, but the unsophisticated sense of mankind is against them, agreeing with Homer that the memory of griefs when past may be a joy, and with Dante that there is no greater sorrow than, in misery, to recollect one's happier time. Feelings remembered in this imperfect way must be compared with present or recent feelings by the aid of what we know about them. We identify the remote experience in such a case by conceiving it . The most perfect way of conceiving it is by defining it in terms of some standard scale. If I know the thermometer to stand at zero to-day and to have stood at 32o last Sunday, I know to-day to be colder, and I know just how much colder, than it was last Sunday. If I know that a certain note was c , and that this note is d , I know that this note must be the higher of the two. The inference that two things differ because their concomitants, effects, names, kinds, or—to put it generally—their signs , differ, is of course susceptible of unlimited complication. The sciences furnish examples, in the way in which

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In Chapter XXI, as will be remembered, it was said that the sentiment of reality with which an object appealed to the mind is proportionate (amongst other things) to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will. Here we get the obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, objects, considerations, which (in these lethargic states) fail to get to the will, fail to draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal. The connection of the reality of things with their effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas. Men do not differ so much in their mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued from their differing fates. No class of them have better sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the 'dead-beats,' whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters erect. No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do; as far as moral insight goes, in comparison with them, the orderly and prosperous philistines whom they scandalize are sucking babes. And yet their moral knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in the background, —discerning, commenting, protesting, longing, half resolving, —never wholly resolves, never gets its voice out of the minor into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive into the imperative mood, never breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its hands. In such characters as Rousseau and Restif it would seem as if the lower motives had all the impulsive efficacy in their hands. Like trains with the right of way, they retain exclusive possession of the track. The more ideal motives exist alongside of them in profusion, but they never get switched on, and the man's conduct is no more influenced by them than an express train is influenced by a wayfarer standing by the roadside and calling to be taken aboard. They are an inert accompaniment to the end of time; and the consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one of the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of tears.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  which sustains a long note, while all else is hushed. . . . This one note will appear very protracted—why? Because we expect to hear accompanying it the notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come." (Herbart: Psychol. als W., §115.)—Compare also Münsterberg, Beiträge, Heft 2, p. 41. [542] A night of pain will seem terribly long; we keep looking forward to a moment which never comes—the moment when it shall cease. But the odiousness of this experience is not named ennui or Langweile , like the odiousness of time that seems long from its emptiness. The more positive odiousness of the pain, rather, is what tinges our memory of the night. What we feel, as Prof. Lazarus says (op cit . p. 202), is the long time of the suffering, not the suffering of the long time per se . [543] On these variations of time-estimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness of Time. in Mind, vol. III. p. 297; J. Sully, Illusions, pp. 245-261, 302-305; W. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., II. 287, 288; besides the essays quoted from Lazarus and Janet. In German, the successors of Herbart have treated of this subject: compare Volkmann's Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 89, and for references to other authors his note 3 to this section. Lindner (Lbh. d. empir. Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances Alexander the Great's life (thirty-three years), which seems to us as if it must be long, because it was so eventful. Similarly the English Commonwealth, etc. [544] Physiol Optik, p. 445. [545] Succession, time per se , is no force. Our talk about its devouring tooth, etc., is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of inertia is incompatible with time's being assumed as an efficient cause of anything. [546] Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 87. Compare also H. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 154. [547] The cause of the perceiving, not the object perceived. [548] "'No more' and 'not yet' are the proper time-feelings, and we are aware of time in no other way than through these feelings," says Volkmann (Psychol., § 87). This, which is not strictly true of our feeling of time per se , as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of date in its events. [549] We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling in the cars makes a succession of different fields of view pass before our eyes. When those that have passed from present sight revive in memory, they maintain their mutual order because their contents overlap. We think them as having been before or behind each other; and, from the multitude of the views we can recall behind the one now presented, we compute the total space we have passed through. It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that of space, because children have so vague an idea of all dates before yesterday and after to-morrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions that exceed as greatly their unit

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Here, Kahneman explores the concept of life as a narrative, elucidating the ways in which humans evaluate experiences through the lens of the remembering self. He uses Violetta's tragic story from Verdi's opera "La Traviata" to exemplify how the endings and climactic moments dramatize our recollections, overshadowing the overall duration of the experience. This section emphasizes that significant events often dominate our memories, leading to duration neglect and skewed evaluations of life events. By referencing psychological examinations conducted by Ed Diener, Kahneman illustrates that our assessments of life satisfaction are similarly influenced by peak-end biases, where individuals may ignore long periods of happiness in favor of dramatic or negative conclusions. This narrative framing invites readers to scrutinize the stories they construct about their lives and recognize the tenuous relationship between perception and reality. In this section, Kahneman presents a thought experiment contrasting the experiences of the remembering self versus the experiencing self during vacations. He discusses how decisions regarding vacations are often dictated by future memories rather than real experiences, leading individuals to prioritize experiences that may not yield immediate enjoyment. By referring to Ed Diener’s findings, he illustrates how participants' satisfaction ratings about their vacations were largely influenced by their final evaluations rather than the quality of the experience itself. Kahneman encourages readers to reflect on how aspects of memory construction and the desire for memorable moments can distort their true experiences. Through scenarios that erase memory, he reveals that many people value the remembering self's ability to recall positive events more than the actual enjoyment of the experience as it occurs. This insight challenges traditional notions of happiness and satisfaction, urging individuals to consider what holistic appreciation of life truly means. This chapter explores how emotional well-being varies across different activities and circumstances, emphasizing the significance of situational contexts and personal goals in determining happiness. In this chapter, Kahneman introduces the U-index, a tool for measuring the proportion of time individuals spend in negative emotional states during different activities. The chapter contrasts American and French women's experiences with child care and leisure, revealing cultural implications. Kahneman asserts that mood is influenced by immediate situations and discusses data from national surveys to illustrate the link between emotional well-being and social connections. In this section, Kahneman introduces the concept of the U-index as a pivotal quantitative measure to assess the emotional states experienced during various activities. By analyzing data from 1,000 American women, he highlights specific activities yielding higher negative emotional states—29% for commuting, 27% for work, and 24% for child care. Uniquely, it reveals that American women's interactions with their children can be less enjoyable than household chores, contrasting with the more favorable emotional experiences reported by French women, who, while spending less time with their children, report greater enjoyment, potentially due to better child care access. This insight prompts a broader consideration of how situational factors and cultural contexts shape emotional well-being and daily life satisfaction.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Kahneman begins by addressing the inherent conflict between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self." The chapter emphasizes that while experiences of pain and pleasure are felt as an entire episode, the recalling of these experiences focuses predominantly on specific moments—the peak of intensity and the conclusion—while neglecting the duration. He explains how evolutionary principles may explain this selective memory, illustrated by experiments involving rats showing that the duration of a painful stimulus has little bearing on their fear response; only the intensity matters. This finding serves as a reminder that humans also prioritize peaks and ends in their memories, neglecting what transpires in between. The author elaborates on how our decision-making processes can become skewed due to these memory inaccuracies, using the "cold-hand experiment" as a case study. He notes that decisions based on misremembered experiences, whether they relate to painful medical procedures or vacations, highlight a surprising disregard for the overall duration of an experience. This has profound implications: it challenges the rationality of human choices, revealing that many decisions reflect faulty memories rather than true preferences. Kahneman emphasizes that individuals often end up opting for longer, more painful experiences because they misjudge the future based on their memory of peaks and ends. As the chapter progresses, Kahneman uses narrative examples to illustrate the importance of how we perceive and store significant life events. He argues that our lives are often evaluated as cohesive stories rather than mere sequences of moments, leading to what he terms "duration neglect." This neglect can skew our emotional responses; he references Ed Diener’s research on how people assess fictional lives, finding that the total happiness attributed to a character often overlooks the duration of happiness and focuses instead on select moments, which includes failures in our evaluations. The results of these studies reveal a less-is-more effect, where additional years may actually diminish overall life desirability when mixed with less happy moments. In conclusion, Kahneman urges readers to recognize the discrepancies embedded within our decision-making processes and how memory shapes our experiences. The chapter serves as both a warning and an insight regarding the biases that arise from how we remember versus how we experience, encouraging a closer examination of our internal narratives and the stories we construct about ourselves. In this section, Kahneman addresses the disparity between experienced utility and decision utility, illustrating how human memory can lead to irrational choices in pain and pleasure assessments. He discusses the cold-hand experiment, emphasizing that memories often neglect the duration of experiences, focusing instead on peak moments and conclusions. This duality between the experiencing self and the remembering self reflects a fundamental conflict in decision-making, where preferences do not always align with one’s best interests. Kahneman underscores that this oversight can manifest in choices related to medical procedures and life events, ultimately challenging the rational-agent model of human behavior. By articulating these concepts, he invites readers to reevaluate their understanding of pain duration and the principles governing their memories in decision-making contexts.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Weeds are pulled or poisoned without mercy; seeds are selected and sown. There’s nothing free or spontaneous about such a place. Accidents are unwelcome. But the story says that before their fall from grace, Adam and Eve lived carefree, naked, and innocent—lacking nothing. Their world provided what they needed: food, shelter, and companionship. But after the Fall, the good times were over. Food, previously the gift of a generous world, now had to be earned through hard work. Women suffered in giving birth. And sexual pleasure—formerly guilt-free—became a source of humiliation and shame. Although the biblical story has it that the first humans were expelled from the garden, the narrative clearly got reversed somewhere along the line. The curse suffered by Adam and Eve centers around the exchange of the arguably low-stress, high-pleasure life of foragers (or bonobos) for the dawn-to-dusk toil of a farmer in his garden. Original sin represents the attempt to explain why on Earth our ancestors ever accepted such a raw deal. 1 The story of the Fall gives narrative structure to the traumatic transition from the take-it-where-you-find-it hunter-gatherer existence to the arduous struggle of agriculturalists. Contending with insects, rodents, weather, and the reluctant Earth itself, farmers were forced to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow rather than just finding the now-forbidden fruit and eating it hand to mouth, as their ancestors had done forever. No wonder foragers have almost never shown any interest in learning farming techniques from Europeans. As one forager put it, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” Books like this one, concerning human nature, are beacons for trouble. On one hand, everybody’s an expert. Being human, we all have opinions about human nature. Such an understanding seems to require little more than a modicum of common sense and some attention to our own incessant cravings and aversions. Simple enough. But making sense of human nature is anything but simple. Human nature has been landscaped, replanted, weeded, fertilized, fenced off, seeded, and irrigated as intensively as any garden or seaside golf course. Human beings have been under cultivation longer than we’ve been cultivating anything else. Our cultures domesticate us for obscure purposes, nurturing and encouraging certain aspects of our behavior and tendencies while seeking to eliminate those that might be disruptive. Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal. 2 Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled—though as we’ll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But an intellectual understanding of this aspect of most men’s inner reality doesn’t make accepting it any easier for many women. Writer and film director Nora Ephron has explored these issues in many of her films, including Heartburn, which was based on her own failed marriage. In a 2009 interview she explained how raising two sons had informed her view of men: “Boys are so sweet,” she said. “But the problem with men is not whether they’re nice or not. It’s that it’s hard for them at a certain point in their lives to stay true. It just is. It’s almost not their fault.” But then she added, “It feels like it’s their fault if you are involved with any of them.” 21 The Perils of Monotomy (Monogamy + Monotony) The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful. C ARL J UNG, in a letter to Freud dated January 30, 1910 Remember what Phil said about how sex with his wife had grown overly familiar, how he’d come to feel he and Helen were “siblings, almost”? Interesting word choice. The strongest explanation for the prevalence and intensity of the Coolidge effect among social mammals is that the male drive for sexual variety is evolution’s way of avoiding incest. Our species evolved on a sparsely populated planet—never more than a few million and probably fewer than 100,000 of us on Earth for most of our evolutionary past. To avoid the genetic stagnation that would have dragged our ancestors into extinction long ago, males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar. While this carrot-and-stick mechanism worked well to promote genetic diversity in the prehistoric environment, it’s causing lots of problems now. When a couple have been living together for years, when they’ve become family, this ancient anti-incest mechanism can effectively block eroticism for many men, leading to confusion and hurt feelings all around. 22 Earlier, we discussed how men’s testosterone levels recede over the years, but it’s not just the passing of time that brings these levels down: monogamy itself seems to drain away a man’s testosterone. Married men consistently show lower levels of the hormone than single men of the same age; fathers of young children, even less. Men who are particularly responsive to infants show declines of 30 percent or more right after their child is born. Married men having affairs, however, were found to have higher testosterone levels than those who weren’t. 23 Additionally, most of the men having affairs have told researchers they were actually quite happy in their marriages, while only one-third of women having affairs felt that way.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin. Everything in Darya Alexandrovna's house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as a little while before. 'And what does she talk French with the children for?' he thought; 'how unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so. Learning French and unlearning sincerity,' he thought to himself, unaware that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French in that way. 'But why are you going? Do stay a little.' Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humour had vanished, and he felt ill at ease. After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in, and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly disturbed, with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes! While Levin had been outside, an incident had occurred which had utterly shattered all the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in her children. Grisha and Tanya had been fighting over a ball. Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw a terrible sight. Tanya was pulling Grisha's hair, while he, with a face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists wherever he could get at her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna's heart when she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely most ordin ary, but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal propensities—wicked children. She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not speak to Levin of her misery. Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said it, he was thinking in his heart: 'No, I won't be artificial and talk French with my children; but my children won't be like that. All one has to do is not to spoil children, not to distort their nature, and they'll be delightful. No, my children won't be like that.' He said good-bye and drove away, and she did not try to keep him. XI I N the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin's sister's estate, about fifteen miles from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin to report on how things were going there and on the hay. The chief source of income on his sister's estate was from the riverside meadows. In former years the hay had been bought by the peasants for twenty roubles the three acres.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as though afraid of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an object of pity. On the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in society, as one sometimes looks at those one loves, trying to see him as if he were a stranger, so as to catch the impression he must make on others, she saw with a panic even of jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable figure, that he was very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather old-fashioned, reserved courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she thought, and expressive face. But she saw him not from without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town; sometimes she recognised that it was really hard for him to order his life here so that he could be satisfied with it. What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not go to a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky's type—she knew now what that meant… it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with her, her mother and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed their conversations for ever on the same subjects— 'Alme-Nadine,' as the old prince called the sisters' talks—she knew it must bore him. What was there left for him to do? To go on writing at his book he had indeed attempted, and at first he used to go to the library and make extracts and look up references for his book. But, as he told her, the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything. And besides, he complained that he had talked too much about his book here, and that consequently all his ideas about it were muddled and had lost their interest for him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Conceive the position of a man who knows that his children, the children of the woman he loves, will not be his, but will belong to someone who hates them and cares nothing about them! It is awful! He paused, evidently much moved. 'Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?' queried Darya Alexandrovna. 'Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation,' he said, calming himself with an effort. 'Anna can, it depends on her. . . . Even to petition the Tsar for legitimisation, a divorce is essential. And that depends on Anna. Her husband agreed to a divorce—at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And now, I know, he would not refuse it. It is only a matter of writing to him. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he would not refuse. Of course,' he said gloomily, 'it is one of those Pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing her, he must have a letter from her. I can understand that it is agony to her. But the matter is of such importance, that one must passer par-dessus toutes ces finesses de sentiment. Il y va du bonheur et de l'existence d'Anne et de ses enfants. I won't speak of myself, though it's hard for me, very hard,' he said, with an expression as though he were threatening someone for its being hard for him. 'And so it is, princess, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor of salvation. Help me to persuade her to write to him and ask for a divorce.' 'Yes, of course,' Darya Alexandrovna said dreamily, as she vividly recalled her last interview with Alexey Alexandrovitch. 'Yes, of course,' she repeated with decision, thinking of Anna. 'Use your influence with her, make her write. I don't like—I'm almost unable to speak about this to her.' 'Very well, I will talk to her. But how is it she does not think of it herself?' said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she suddenly at that point recalled Anna's strange new habit of half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna drooped her eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon. 'Just as though she half-shut her eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything,' thought Dolly. 'Yes, indeed, for my own sake and for hers I will talk to her,' Dolly said in reply to his look of gratitude. They got up and walked to the house. XXII W HEN Anna found Dolly at home before her, she looked intently in her eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'We have a railway now,' he said in answer to his uncle's question. 'It's like this, do you see: two sit on a bench—they're the passengers; and one stands up straight on the bench. And all are harnessed to it by their arms or by their belts, and they run through all the rooms—the doors are left open beforehand. Well, and it's pretty hard work being the conductor!' 'That's the one that stands?' Stepan Arkadyevitch inquired, smiling. 'Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when they stop all of a sudden, or someone falls down.' 'Yes, that must be a serious matter,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, watching with mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother's; not childish now—no longer fully innocent. And though he had promised Alexey Alexandrovitch not to speak of Anna, he could not restrain himself. 'Do you remember your mother?' he asked suddenly. 'No, I don't,' Seryozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, and his face clouded over. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him. His tutor found his pupil on the staircase half an hour later, and for a long while he could not make out whether he was ill-tempered or crying. 'What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?' said the tutor. 'I told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to speak to the director.' 'If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that's certain.' 'Well, what is it, then?' 'Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don't remember . . . what business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!' he said, addressing not his tutor, but the whole world. XX S TEPAN A RKADYEVITCH, as usual, did not waste his time in Petersburg. In Petersburg, besides business, his sister's divorce, and his coveted appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself up, as he said, after the mustiness of Moscow. In spite of its cafés chantants and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevitch always felt it. After living for some time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he was conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began to be worrying himself over his wife's ill-humour and reproaches, over his children's health and education, and the petty details of his official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to go and stay a little while in Petersburg, in the circle there in which he moved, where people lived—really lived—instead of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted away at once, like wax before the fire. His wife? . . .

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin scowled, and without answering her, he sat down again to his work, repeating to himself all that he had been thinking of the real significance of that work. Only at intervals he listened in the stillness to the click of Agafea Mihalovna's needles, and recollecting what he did not want to remember, he frowned again. At nine o'clock they heard the bell and the faint vibration of a carriage over the mud. 'Well, here's visitors come to us, and you won't be dull,' said Agafea Mihalovna, getting up and going to the door. But Levin overtook her. His work was not going well now, and he was glad of a visitor, whoever it might be. XXXI R UNNING half-way down the staircase, Levin caught a sound he knew, a familiar cough in the hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he caught sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, and now it seemed there was no possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that this tall man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his brother Nikolay. Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture. Just now, when Levin, under the influence of the thoughts that had come to him, and Agafea Mihalovna's hint, was in a troubled and uncertain humour, the meeting with his brother that he had to face seemed particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humour, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do. Angry with himself for so base a feeling, Levin ran into the hall; as soon as he had seen his brother close, this feeling of selfish disappointment vanished instantly and was replaced by pity. Terrible as his brother Nikolay had been before in his emaciation and sickliness, now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted. He was a skeleton covered by skin. He stood in the hall, jerking his long thin neck, and pulling the scarf off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile. When he saw that smile, submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his throat. 'You see I've come to you,' said Nikolay in a thick voice, never for one second taking his eyes off his brother's face. 'I've been meaning to a long while, but I've been unwell all the time.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so long in Dolly's room, she must have had with her. But in her expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But she only said— 'I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don't you?' 'Oh, I've known her a long while, you know. She's very good-hearted, I suppose, mais excessivement terre-à-terre. Still, I'm very glad to see her.' He took Anna's hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes. Misinterpreting the look, she smiled at him. Next morning, in spite of the protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin's coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses and his coach with the patched mudguards, drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach. Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly's departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by. their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading. As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how they had liked being at Vronsky's, when suddenly the coachman, Philip, expressed himself unasked— 'Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn't a grain left by cockcrow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now down to forty-five kopecks. At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat.' 'The master's a screw,' put in the counting-house clerk. 'Well, did you like their horses?' asked Dolly. 'The horses! —there's no two opinions about them. And the food was good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don't know what you thought,' he said, turning his handsome, good-natured face to her. 'I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?' 'Eh, we must!'