On Being Happy With Your Life vs In Your Life

And Why Deathbed Reflections Are Overrated

Hi friends,

I just finished watching a documentary about Carlos Alcaraz, a wunderkind professional tennis player who, at just 22 years old, already has four Grand Slam titles to his name. You’d expect the documentary to be joyous and celebratory. Instead, it’s laced with a palpable tension—both between Carlos and his team and within Carlos himself (see this excellent recap by tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg).

There are moments when Carlos seems genuinely content with his success. After a big tournament, he wants to relax—to spend time with his friends and family, unwinding by the beach. But in other moments, you see him defer to the demands of his team, who expect him to stay focused and train relentlessly year-round. From their perspective, winning four Grand Slams is small potatoes: Carlos needs to become the greatest player in tennis history.

The thing is, Carlos does want that, too. Well, kind of. He would, of course, love to one day rank alongside the likes of Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic. But you can see that he is grappling in real time with the personal costs of that ambition.

One particularly disheartening scene shows Carlos trying to reconcile this very real tension by framing a break as a means to an end. He argues to his coaches that he needs a vacation not simply because he is a human being who is entitled to such luxuries, but because it will improve his performance on the court. He can even point to clear examples from his tennis career in which he played some of his best tennis after taking time off. You can see in Carlos’s eyes a glimmer of hope in this logic: maybe his goals of being a well-adjusted 20-something and becoming one of the all-time tennis greats are in fact compatible?

But his hope is short-lived. In a later scene, you see him falter in a match following one such break. Carlos’s team berates him for having been short-sighted, and his mental crisis reemerges in full force. The documentary ends in a contemplative, angst-filled place: What exactly is Carlos willing to sacrifice now for the promise of potential championships later? Just how much of his youth is he willing to give away for this lofty, long-term dream?

Alcaraz’s questions made me think of psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research on happiness. Sonja breaks happiness into two components:

1. Being happy in your life; and

2. Being happy with your life

If you’re happy in your life, you’re experiencing a high ratio of positive to negative emotions on any given day. It’s the affective form of happiness. If you’re happy with your life, it means that you are satisfied when you reflect on how your life is going overall. It’s the cognitive form of happiness. (Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman drew a similar distinction with the idea of the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self.”)

These two kinds of happiness can of course co-exist, but they can also diverge. For example, a new parent might feel full of positivity and gratitude when they reflect on how their life is going, but might experience a flurry of negative emotions day to day due to sleep deprivation and other stressors. Similarly, there have been periods in my life when each day felt relatively easy and stress-free, but I also had little purpose. When I reflect back on those periods, I feel unfulfilled.

So, how should we think about balancing these two types of happiness? How much daily pain and frustration should we be willing to endure if it means we can look back on our life with great satisfaction? (Is a 15-year happiness hit for Carlos worth it if he can become one of the greats? What about 10 or 5? Where do we draw the line when it comes to legacy? And if we know that daily stress has a negative, long-lasting impact on our health, how much should we factor that into the equation?)

On a related note, popular culture tends to frame our deathbed reflections as the ultimate moment of truth. It is the point when we decide whether we lived our lives well. We privilege this moment far more than all the ones that came before.

But why? I think this final moment of retrospection should not carry the weight that it does. It is, after all, just one moment. If your deathbed reflections leave you feeling unsatisfied, but you enjoyed many wonderful moments in your life in real time, I think it should count as a good life. By contrast, if you feel deeply satisfied on your deathbed, but were chronically stressed and anxious day to day, was it actually a life well lived? I’m not so sure. It’s an interesting question to ponder.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments: what kind of happiness are you currently trying to solve for in your life and how do you think about managing the trade-offs? How has your relationship with these two types of happiness changed over time?

Maya 💫