More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes -- or napping, or shopping, or answering emails -- to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one -- and nothing -- provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales. . Jennifer Senior
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. - Robert A. Heinlein
  2. Happiness [is] only real when shared - Jon Krakauer
  3. Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or... - Fred Rogers
  4. Top 15 Things Money Can’t BuyTime. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity. - Roy T. Bennett
  5. Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you... - Roy T. Bennett
More Quotes By Jennifer Senior
  1. The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.
  2. More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes -- or napping, or shopping, or answering emails -- to spending time with our kids. (I...
  3. Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they're about to no longer be.
  4. You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected, " says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.
  5. We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self.
Related Topics