In a currently unpublished large survey of over 8,500 people, psychologists Matt Killingsworth, Lisa Stewart, and Joshua Greene added a twist to the experience sampling approach. At random times, they asked participants to write down what activity they were doing and how long it would last, and then respond to the question, “If you could, and it had no negative consequences, would you jump forward in time to the end of what you’re currently doing?” That is, they asked participants to imagine having the option of simply not experiencing—though still doing—whatever activity they were engaged in at that moment.

Numerous studies show that we process negative and positive information differently. You might say we’re saddled with a “negativity bias.” We take in “bad” information, including small mistakes and failures, more readily than “good” information. We have more trouble letting go of bad compared to good thoughts. We remember the negative things that happen to us more vividly and for longer than we do the positive ones. We pay more attention to negative than positive feedback. People interpret negative facial expressions more quickly than positive ones. Bad, simply put, is stronger than good. This is not to say we agree with or value it more but rather that we notice it more.

In 2010 Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University tried to quantify the relationship of money to happiness using a year-long Gallup survey that resulted in a massive dataset of 450,000 daily responses from a nationally representative sample of one thousand people.

Deaton and Kahneman showed that in the United States, $75,000 seemed to be a kind of magic number at that time. Once a household income was more than $75,000 per year, which was close to the average family income in the U.S. at the time of the study, the amount of money that people earned showed no clear relationship to daily reports of enjoyment and laughter, which were used as indicators of emotional well-being.

We often have two contradictory feelings about the time we have available to us. On one hand we sense a time famine and feel that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we need to do, let alone that we want to do. On the other hand, we tend to think that in some unspecified future we will have a time surplus, as if we’ll get to a place in our lives where the kinds of things capturing our time right now will cease to consume us.

most bemusing were those who seemed to intentionally trip themselves up – because it showed that they were a free spirit, or glamorously troubled, or too popular for secondary reading. They seemed to think it was interesting to be bad at things. They didn’t seem to understand that being bad at things was the default. Almost everyone since the dawn of time had been bad at almost everything. It was simply the world operating as expected. It was like if you let go of an object and all it did was drop inertly to the ground. Far more remarkable if, when you let go, it began to fly.