Two scenarios for you:
a) you go to a wonderful Kate Bush concert, you love it, but when you get back to your car it’s been broken into, window smashed etc, and the whole evening is ruined.
b) your daughter’s wedding is the best day ever, but seven years later her husband turns out to be no good and she’s getting divorced, and the memory of the wedding day is ruined.
BUT you did have fun at the gig, and the wedding day was 8 hours of pure happiness, so – CAN that happiness be taken away from you? The memory is tainted but that happiness is surely still “in the bag”, in your collection of happy things you’ve done in your life?
The answer, I think, is “partly”.
There are two types of happiness – hedonic happiness which is the fun you had at the time – that is done, you got it, it’s in your collection bag of life (CBL).
The other type of happiness is udaemonic happiness, the life satisfaction, or joy of remembering, and THAT has now been taken away by the car vandals or your daughter’s feckless husband. You no longer get the happy feeling each time you listen to a Kate Bush song or pass that photo on the mantle piece of your daughter’s wedding day.
Which one is bigger? Well that depends on you but I think the second one is probably bigger. More has been lost, when you spread it over the many years to come, than has been bagged on the day.
The only thing to add, and the reason why I have given two examples rather than just one, is that in the case of Kate the car vandals were not connected to Kate at all, so you could / should be able to separate out the memories and say “forget the car – the gig was GREAT!!”. With some mental skill you can still keep your Joy of Remembering (JOM).
….while the wedding and the subsequent disappointment in the groom are connected, which means that it’s harder to say that the wedding was great. Yes, you enjoyed it because you were deluded, you hadn’t yet discovered the truth, so yes you DID enjoy it, but SHOULD you have? Maybe it wasn’t a happy day, it was a foolishly happy-feeling-but-really-a-not-very-good day after all. The joy of remembering really is hard to keep!
More thoughts on happiness can be found at my Happiness podcast: Happy(ish)
