Happiness, Meaning, and Psychological Richness: People Have Time-Inconsistent Preferences for the Good Life

What version of the good life do people want, and when do they want it? This paper investigates the relative preference for happiness, meaning, and psychological richness across time. We predicted that people consistently prefer high levels of happiness in life across all time perspectives, but prefer lower levels of meaning and psychological richness in the present and shorter time horizons than in the future and longer time horizons– reflecting time-inconsistent preferences for the good life. Four pre-registered experiments with US-based participants (total N = 3,409) support this hypothesis. Compared to the present, people prefer more meaning and psychological richness when thinking about their life ahead or looking back from the future (Experiments 1 and 3). Preferred activities in the ideal present are also rated as less meaningful and psychologically rich than those in the ideal future and past (Experiment 2). We also find that this effect occurs linearly (Experiment 4), such that the relative preference for meaning and psychological richness increases with longer future time horizons (e.g., next week < next year). Finally, we find that time-inconsistent well-being preferences are driven by stronger effort-avoidance in present than distant time perspectives, and this effect is weaker for individuals with high trait self-control.