Invitations and Becomings

Chris Bertram has a lovely post over at Crooked Timber on having a second-order desire not to have your first-order desires satisfied all the time.

So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much.

Ah, Chris. We can tell so much about ourselves by the kinds of examples we use! You see, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Yes, that's the difference between porn and burlesque."

After saying that, I better not mention that they see a connection between this and the post at 11D about parents being 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.

Me, I don't see the connection. I think that has more to do with parents being less inclined to use the word 'I'. As my grandfather used to say, there's no I in family... ok, there is, but it's a small i, and it only comes out when someone's not getting what they need.

So, I think the result is an artifact of the interview itself - pull me out of my family context and quiz me about how happy I am, and you just get a report of those times when I feel myself to be at odds with that context, hence the relative skew away from happiness. But then, I can't imagine an interview technique that could properly measure happiness without abstracting from that context. If it's a truism that even the most functional (or least dysfunctional) families have a tough time at christmas, or passover, or whatever, i.e. when they all supposed to get together and be happy about being together, what chance does a researcher have of measuring how they actually feel about being together.