Life Satisfaction

When assessing our personal sense of subjective well-being—how we feel we’re doing at a given moment—we usually prioritize temporal conditions, like if we’re too hot or too cold, feeling ill or stressed, or if we’re irritated (at someone or something, or in general).

After assessing those of-the-moment variables, though, we’ll tend to refocus our attention on our more fundamental condition, including our affect—our general psychological tone—and our sense of life satisfaction.

Affect is influenced by all sorts of things, and it can be thought of as our internal bias toward positive or negative assumptions and psychological filtering.

Someone with a positive affect will tend to be more upbeat and optimistic, and will thus be more likely to perceive the things that happen to them through that lens, bouncing back from bad things faster and benefitting more from the good things.

Folks with a negative affect will tend to do the opposite, gleaning little from good things (because they’re worried about what happens next, or that maybe said things are not as good as they seem) and leaning into the bad stuff, assuming that stuff is the norm, and that they therefore can’t do much of anything to improve their situation.