Our lives are a constant journey of constructing stories about the direction we are headed in and making sense of our experiences. We often believe that our current life is better because we worked hard to create it, compared to our past selves. The example of Clive Wearing, a memory patient with amnesia, highlights how humans constantly feel like they are waking up for the first time, trying to figure things out and believing that they have finally achieved clarity, only to repeat the pattern in the future.
Can you be too happy? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about our emotional control systems, which seem to work at bringing both sadness and happiness back to a steady baseline. Too much happiness is--perhaps surprisingly--not necessarily a good thing. They also explore whether our general level of happiness is really related to events in our lives or connected to something much larger than ourselves.