“Want to be happier? Stay in the moment." - Matt Killingsworth

When I first stumbled my way through the list of Ted Talk options I did not immediately gravitate to this particular one. I watched a handful of videos from the list but none of them sparked my interest enough to write an entire paper on. However, when I looked at the list one last time the title caught my eye. Within the first thirty seconds of Dr. Matt Killingsworth's lecture, I knew that this was the video that I had been waiting for and could invest my energy into a worthy response. Let’s not forget that the length of the video was only ten minutes, therefore, even more appealing.

Dr. Killingsworth began by stating that, “Aristotle called happiness ‘the chief good,’ the end towards which all other things aim.” I agree with the late influential thinker and hearing those words my brain lead me to the previous few hours. Earlier I had stumbled upon a relatable blurb from the wonderful world of Twitter. With the theme of “being in the moment,” naturally, I had to pause the video to check my phone in hopes of finding the writer that had deeply inspired me. Unable to locate it (Why didn’t I retweet it?!) I wrote my notes from memory along with my interpretations and then continued with the task at hand.

During the next ten to twenty minutes, I was introduced to the question of why happiness is not apparent in the everyday American lifestyle. To keep the Dream alive we are told from a young age that if we are to find true happiness then all we need to do is acquire a certain amount of “things.” If we treat and fuel our bodies correctly then we will be rewarded with a longer life span to enjoy that new home and fancy car, maybe a few posh vacations over the years. If we work hard and make it to the top, essentially we are leveling up in life, and then of course… we can acquire more things! One might do all of this and yet happiness will still elude them. For happiness to be broken down and understood, it needs to be found on a daily scale. That means that it needs to be broken down even further to the moment-by-moment experience we all have.

Dr. Killingsworth introduced his idea to scientifically track and collect this specific data. The website TrackYourHappiness.org was designed to “send out random signals” throughout the day and each applicant would be asked questions about their happiness levels and the factors of their own “snapshot moment” that had occurred right before the signal was received. This was an endeavor that had never been done before and it proved to be a wide-reaching success. Over 15,000 people participated, all hailing from over 80 countries with many variations in lifestyle demographics and giving over 650,000 real-time reports, Killingsworth was able to begin finding answers to where all the happiness had gone.

It should be noted that the projector screen shown to the audience displayed the website name but also included a 2009 Windows Desktop and a first-generation iPhone screen. My first thought was, “Well, maybe that explains why ‘notifications’ are being called ‘signals.’” My second thought was wondering if the website was still up and active. I maintained the willpower to continue watching the video and after it was over, I discovered that there was now a new and improved app available for download.

Enter the main attraction to the entire Ted Talk: mind-wandering. Defined in the video as “straying away from the present moment,” the truth rang out loud and clear in my mind. This talk was aimed directly at me.

As Dr. Killingsworth dove into the next part of his study, the obvious question was asked. What is the correlation-causation relationship between happiness and mind-wandering? Does a baseline of unhappiness lead to mind-wandering, possibly to escape the present moment that may be unpleasant to the person? Or does thinking about the past and future events cause one to then fall into an unhappy state? Luckily, the questions asked by Track Your Happiness are minute-to-minute and given to a large number of people spanning over a length of time. This made it so Dr. Killingsworth was able to see that there was a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and then becoming unhappy shortly after, versus almost no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering later. He concluded that mind-wandering is likely a cause and therefore, not a consequence of unhappiness.

What shocked me the most wasn’t the fact that data spanning over 22 different activities, showed that 47% of the time people are thinking about something other than what they’re presently doing. To me, the unbelievable fact was that, with one exception, no matter the daily task or activity we might be participating in, we are mind-wandering about 30% of the time, all of the time.

It truly puts into perspective how much time we spend inside our heads, in other worlds, or at another moment in time. We waste our energy in a state of mind or place that doesn’t suit us for the present moment and will eventually only bring more stress into our already stressful lives. Going back to what Aristotle said, I am driven to paraphrase the lost twitter quote that he possibly would have agreed with.

The notion that peace and joy should not be the “end of life” or core goal of living. Those “things” should be the necessities of living that each of us must find within every moment given. We are then choosing to wake up every day and experience the next joyous moment. Or to embrace and command the small moments of “bad” that are inevitable. If we don’t figure out how that works now, then we will be left to “rest in peace.”