In my previous life in Academia, I did research in selective attention for many years. It was interesting to observe how much of the internal mechanisms that guide our behavior are inaccessible to our conscious self. Our rational mind is surprisingly limited and it’s not such a great tool when dealing with complex and multidimensional decisions.
Decision making research has also shown that we have a less than perfect understanding of why we make the choices we make. It’s not an easy concept to embrace: we are so attached to the idea that everything we do has a logical justification and that we can we list all the pros and cons of each alternative and weight them correctly to come up with the best alternative. We want to believe that we have complete rational control of our actions.
When I started working in usability, I trained myself to believe only what I saw and to understand what I heard on the basis of people’s actions and not on its literal meaning. In a usability test (as in a focus group or any similar situation) people want to be kind, and they try really hard to give you a rational explanation of their behavior. Sometimes they are right, but most of the times they are not. We know that people are really bad in predicting their future behavior, especially if they have to describe something they are not familiar with (a new product, and new environment, etc.). In my experience, people are fairly bad in understanding and explaining their current actions and preferences as well.
Maybe I am just trying to justify my inability to come up with what I want and what would make me happy. I’ve always had the impression that things that happened to me have been better than things that I’ve chosen for myself and fought hard to achieve.
The disappointing truth is that, when it comes to big existential decisions and sometimes even to smaller day-to-day decisions, I don’t really know what I want before I experience it. When I am doing something, I am able to tell what works and what doesn’t work for me by paying attention to my feelings and reactions. But if I start from some abstract idea of what I like or, even worse, from principles and ideals, I often fool myself in thinking that I would love something that sounds really good and cool and instead I find myself hating it.
If you think about what has been written about finding satisfaction and balance in life, you’ll notice that there are two school of thoughts: the rational school and the experiential school. The rational kind has a top-down approach to happiness: identify your values and goals and then choose your actions based on them. The experiential kind has a bottom-up approach to happiness: start from what is happening to your now, pay attention to your emotions and reactions to things, and build your goals and values from there. You can guess which one I like better.
There are a lot of people who are much better than I am in describing exactly what makes them happy. However, I am not sure that their skill comes from being in touch with their highest values and goals or rather from having paid attention to their feelings and reactions to events and situations throughout their lives and have built an intuitive sense for what makes them happy.