I had the supreme pleasure last weekend of watching one of the most depressing movies of all time—Train Dreams—it was melancholic and beautiful and devastating and heart wrenching and aren’t you just dying to watch it now? (Do watch it though; just as we love listening to sad songs, we do like tales of grief and despair in the right dose, don’t we?) (Maybe don’t watch it if you’ve just recently come out of a deep, dark, bout of clinical depression. Wait like a good 5 – 15 years.)

Anyways!

This line in the movie, spoken so poignantly by the narrator, made me stop in my tracks (get it?! Train Dreams? Tracks?):

“He didn’t know it then, but he would always look back on these years as the happiest of his life.”

Independent of the storyline in the movie, where it was undisputedly true that the protagonist’s life was happy compared to the calamities-to-come, it’s a thought-provoking line, isn’t it?

Let’s look at the first half of the line: “He didn’t know it then…”.
We’re often unable to recognize the goodness when it’s going good. You can’t see the label from inside the jar—that sort of thing. This blind-to-the-moment phenomenon is a gift when life is crummy—who wants the wherewithal to fully grasp that “these are the most heinous years of my life”— but it’s a shame when we lack the awareness of the glory days.

Is it even possible to be aware of how good things really are, in the moment, or do we need the distance of time to realize how good we had it? How can we tune into “the now” and appreciate when things are going pretty darned great?

You know the concept of flow, right? Csikszentmihalyi said these wise words: “Strictly speaking, during the experience [of flow] people are not necessarily happy because they are too involved in the task to have the luxury to reflect on their subjective states. Being happy would be a distraction, an interruption of flow. But afterwards, when the experience is over, people report having been in as positive a state as it is possible to feel.”

Now for the second half of the line: “… he would always look back on these years as the happiest of his life.”
Since most of us won’t have a third-person narrator interpreting our stories for us, this seems like an assessment best made on our deathbeds—an unfortunate place from which to have the most accurate perspective of our full life stories. But who cares about our opinions of how our life stories played out when we’re exhaling for the last time? Don’t we want a sense of our life satisfaction now? And what makes a period of time “the happiest” in our lives anyways?

So many questions.

There is extraordinarily cool research out there about the meta-awareness of pleasure. Check out this thought-provoker:

The suggestion that people may experience pleasure without realizing that they are doing so raises the fundamental issue of the relative merit of having an experience of pleasure versus knowing that you are having it. Consider two situations: you can have an experience that you would rate a “9” if only you stopped to consider it, or one that is an “8” but that you are actually able to stop and savor as it occurs. Does the fact that you can attend to a pleasure as it happens somehow give it greater value, even if it is of lesser sheer hedonic quality? Or is the memory of an intense pleasure, even if it was not acknowledged as such at the time, ultimately of greater importance? Furthermore, if you did not actually attend to the quality of the pleasure at the time, how confident can you be that it really was as good as it is remembered? As you recall the thrill of going down that roller coaster, you may remember it as intense pleasure, but perhaps this is just a reframing of the sheer fear that you actually experienced as you plummeted down the ramp. And if it is the meta-awareness that is remembered, should we live our lives to maximize the actual fleeting pleasure of experiences, or the more enduring, if flawed, retrospective appraisal of it? Although resolving the relative merit of maximizing the experience versus meta-awareness of pleasure is clearly a difficult task, recognizing that there may be sizable differences between the two is certainly an important first step.

Originally I thought, when hearing the line in the movie, I was going to think and write about making these years (RIGHT NOW) the happiest years of our lives. Let’s still do that! But upon digging into the subject it seemed like our perception of our happiness was a more interesting topic. Let’s keep working to make our years full of joy and pleasure and meaning and all the things we want to stuff into them… and let’s also make sure we pause every now and then to look back on how good it was/is. Let’s just not get to the end and realize how magical we had it. It’s happening now and it’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? (Unless you’re the guy in Train Dreams, and well, sorry about your life, pal.)