Temporality and delayed models as dynamic characteristics of happiness

Abramova Sof'ya Borisovna ORCID: 0000-0003-4010-8406 PhD in Sociology Associate Professor; Department of Applied Sociology; Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin 51 Lenin Street, office 328, Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk region, 620083, Russia sofia_abramova@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

Modern approaches to understanding happiness give diverse interpretations both in terms of the content of this concept and in solving the problem of achieving happiness. Increased attention to happiness is observed today both in the political and economic development programs of the world community and individual states, as well as in popular science literature, the media industry, self-knowledge courses, etc.

One of the not always explicitly pronounced, but important aspects of happiness is its temporal characteristic. "Happiness in the present" (calls to live in the present, happiness in small things, etc.) has become the motto of modern popular narratives about happiness. ^[1] However, there are other trends in understanding the dynamism of happiness. The modern world appears as a space of uncertainty, high rates of change and their non-contemporaneity, which changes the horizons of expectation, the experience of happiness in different social groups, the dissonance of the past and the future, etc. ^[2] Models of delayed happiness are formed, associated with the expectation of stable and pronounced happiness in the future, which is opposed to the possibilities of fleeting happiness in the present. ^[3] Happiness as an investment, happiness as a skill, happiness as a universal good – these and other concepts of happiness imply the moment of postponing the onset of happiness until the onset of some events or conditions in the life of an individual or society.

The purpose of the presented research is to identify dynamic characteristics in understanding the phenomenon of happiness: the allocation of temporality as a basic characteristic of the subjective assessment of happiness and the presence of models of postponement in modern ideas about happiness.

Theoretical overview

Based on the analysis of discussions about the essence of the phenomenon of happiness, several aspects of the presence of the context of time in happiness research have been identified.

First, time is seen as a resource necessary to ensure a sense of happiness. Modern researchers compare time and money as the two most valuable human resources, both of which are scarce, both can be saved or spent while ensuring human well-being and have a strikingly strong but different psychological impact. Thus, C. Mogilner and M. I. Norton ^[4] prove that focusing on time leads to greater happiness than constant attention to money. When people think more about the time they have left to live, which they devote to their loved ones or devote to their hobbies, they feel happier than when focusing on work, additional income or shopping. A kind of proof of the greater importance of time for happiness than money is the study of the effect of reducing time deficit on subjective well-being: A.V. Whillansa and colleagues ^[5] revealed greater life satisfaction after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a purely material purchase.

Secondly, time becomes the basis for highlighting age and life experience as factors determining the intensity and manifestation of happiness. In a study by C. Mogilner ^[6], two forms of happiness were identified – based on a sense of excitement and a sense of calm. Young people under 20 years of age are much more likely to express enthusiastic happiness, people from 20 to 40 years of age are equally likely to have both forms of happiness, and over 40 years of age – calm happiness. However, most studies conclude that there is no linear relationship between age and happiness ^[7], as well as a significant impact of socio-economic conditions in different countries on the growth of happiness in some age groups and a decrease in others. ^[8]

Thirdly, time is considered in the context of the influence of the structure of time expenditure on the feeling of happiness. Research shows that an increase in the amount of time spent with family and friends can positively affect global well-being (a person's overall assessment of how well his life is going), even if negative emotions occur in empirical well-being (current feeling) when communicating with these people.^[9]

The fourth context for considering the relationship between time and happiness is related to a historical perspective that captures cultural and historical differences in social concepts of happiness. It emphasizes the presence of two through–lines in the understanding of happiness - hedonistic and eudaimonistic ^[10], around which sociocultural features of the perception and evaluation of happiness in different historical epochs and societies are built. These features can be fixed in languages, ideologies, literary images, holidays and other cultural and institutional elements of society. ^[11] In the history of our country, the period of "Soviet happiness" assumed the constant localization of happiness in the future and serves as a typical example of the concept of deferred happiness: universal happiness will come someday, but now we must give all our strength to ensure that a bright future comes, since genuine, real happiness cannot be individual and personal. ^[12]

The fifth and most interesting aspect of our approach is to consider the temporal perspective of happiness. A time perspective is understood as a multidimensional construct related to a person's ability to anticipate future events and distance themselves from the past. The concept of time perspective, conceptualized by P. G. Zimbardo and J. N. Boyd ^[13], underlies many subsequent discussions: It is often an unconscious process by which the streams of personal and social experience are distributed into time categories/frames, which helps to give these events order, coherence and meaning. To distinguish the concept of delayed happiness, it is important to divide people according to the prevailing orientation: past, present or future. Future-oriented individuals differ from other categories, forget about the pleasures of the present, subordinate the past and the present to the goals of the future, etc.^[14] Orientation to the past or the future itself does not matter for the level of happiness, but positive or negative assessments and expectations play an important role.^[15]

The temporality of subjective life is correlated by a person with socio-historical conditions and becomes an important factor in understanding life prospects and evaluating the present and the past. The temporality of a social subject is based on complex internal experiences of time, determining the pace and rhythm of its temporality, highlighting significant moments in the time continuum, etc.

The temporality of happiness has been the subject of reflection by a number of major thinkers. For T. Adorno ^[16], there is no concept of happiness in the present, because periods of happiness themselves are difficult and tedious emotionally and socially, and they become happy emotions when a person no longer experiences them – happiness arises in reflection, it is stored in memory or arises in hope for the future in the intervals between emotional the experience of the present. According to X. Arendt ^[17], life experience arises in the empty space between the past and the future, experience lies between memory and premonition, between regret and hope. Here, any emotional connection with the past and the future is simply a form of the present, which makes you seriously think about how a happy life can act as a guiding principle for the efforts of society and man (a happy future), if happiness is more a matter of reflection than experience and action. The pragmatism of U. James includes time, knowledge, actions and reflections in the theory of emotions, explaining the time gap between an event and the feeling felt for it, and considers emotions to be social phenomena that are plastic, reflexive, symbolic. In G. Simmel's theory, social experience is limited by many boundaries, and the social subject is aware of them and is able to overcome them. Hence, memories of the past and hopes for the future give meaning to the experience of the present and form a source of happiness in those actions that a person performs to achieve goals ^[18]. V. Tatarkevich also emphasizes that happiness consists in feeling the dynamics of life, the desire to achieve a goal, and not in a state of continuous joy ^[19]. Thus, happiness is based on linking events chronologically separated in a person's mind.

Thus, the temporal context of happiness in this project will be considered in the following aspects: 1) a change in the feeling of happiness in the past – present – future time perspective, 2) the ratio of the assessment of "chronic" (attributive) ^[20] happiness as satisfaction with life in general and "acute happiness" as an assessment of the current feeling of happiness, 3) the presence of an orientation towards postponing happiness for the future (models of deferred happiness), 4) the generational context of the temporality of happiness.

Research methodology

To study the dynamic characteristics in the idea of happiness of different generations, a sociological study was conducted, the tasks of which were to analyze subjective assessments of the level of happiness in the present past and future, to identify the assessment of one's life as a whole, as well as to identify the characteristics of models of delayed happiness in generational groups.

The empirical basis was the results of a sociological survey in September 2024 using the author's methodology. 1,170 urban residents aged 18-60 years were interviewed using an online questionnaire. A quota sampling option was used, the selection was carried out taking into account the following characteristics: gender, age, type of settlement. Among the respondents, 56.5% were female and 43.5% were male. The age limits of the object are determined in accordance with the generational approach: 1) 18-24 years old, generation Z, 32.2% of respondents, 2) 25-40 years old, generation Y, 36.7%, 3) 41-60 years old, generation X, 31.1%. The territorial positioning of the sample includes residents of metropolitan cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg, 22% of respondents), the regional center (Yekaterinburg, 33.3%), cities of the Sverdlovsk region - large (20.5%), as well as medium and small (23.9%).

The results of the study

To subjectively assess the level of happiness, the respondents had to evaluate their feeling of happiness on a 10-point scale (where 1 is not happy at all, and 10 is very happy) at the present time, 5 years ago and the projected expectation in 5 years. The average happiness score in the past was 6.80 points, in the present – 6.86 and in the future – 7.91. This allows us to record a slight increase in happiness from the past to the present and a more pronounced expected increase in happiness in the future. The temporal model of happiness here assumes an increase in the level of happiness throughout life.

28% of respondents believe that their level of happiness in 5 years will remain the same as it is now, 58% have given higher scores to expected happiness, 14% rate their level of happiness in the past higher than it is now. The highest average happiness index at the moment is in the subgroup of those who see themselves the same as they are now in the future (7.9 points), and the lowest assessment of the current situation is among those who expect happiness to grow (6.3 points).

However, there are certain differences in the generational context (Table 1). The younger generation is the only one who currently has a lower subjective happiness score compared to the past (6.71 points compared to 6.90), but they have the highest expected increase in happiness in the future (+1.38 points). 67.9% of young people expect an increase in happiness, but there are also 12.1% who expect their subjective well-being to deteriorate. 25-40-year-olds were the least happy generation 5 years ago, now they have become happier (at the level of the youngest) and their expectation of happiness growth in the future is the average for three generations (+1.24 points). Here, 8.8% expect a decline in happiness, and 63% hope for growth. The oldest, both in the past and in the present, rate their happiness higher than other generations, but their expectation of happiness growth is the lowest (0.51 points). 35.8% of this generation do not expect changes in their sense of happiness, significantly fewer foresee positive trends (42.3%).

Table 1 – Indicators of subjective assessment of the level of happiness in the past, present and future

The level of manifestation of chronic happiness was based on the assessment of one's life on the scale of an imaginary ladder, where the lower step (1 point) is the worst possible life, and the upper step is the best possible life. The average score was 6.47 points, which is lower than the assessment of the current feeling of happiness (6.86). 37.2% of respondents gave the same assessment to their feeling of happiness at the moment and the perception of their life as a whole as good. 38.5% see the present moment as happier than life in general, 24.3% are less happy today than in life as a whole.

In the generational aspect, there is a clearly visible trend: with age, the proportion of those whose assessments of the current state and life generally coincide increases, and the shares of the other two categories decrease (Fig. 1). Among young people, the largest proportion is both those who prefer acute happiness in comparison (42.6%), and those who life as a whole is rated better than the current level of happiness (29.2%). In the older generation, on the contrary, the minimum proportion of the corresponding subgroups (32.9% and 19.9%), but the highest proportion with matching estimates (47.2%). This demonstrates that for the younger generation, the current moment is perceived as passing, with a high probability of change, atypical, but with age, assessments are leveled and the situation with acute happiness becomes typical of life as a whole, showing a general perception of happiness characteristic of this person.

Fig. 1 – A comparative assessment of the level of chronic and current happiness among representatives of different generations

Deferred happiness in our project was measured by postponing a full life for later and by evaluating the well-being of the future as higher in comparison with the present.

Discussing whether they are living a full-fledged life now or rather moving towards a real life in the future, the respondents were divided into two almost equal subgroups: 41.2% regard real life as full-fledged, 45.9% demonstrate a model of delayed happiness, stating that they are only moving towards a full life (12.9% take an uncertain position).

At the same time, assessing the expected situation in the near future, only 6.1% expect the situation to worsen, the majority (65.6%) expect to improve their lives, of which 32.1% expect to live much better, which reinforces the conclusions about the expectation of greater subjective happiness in the future. However, only 41.4% of respondents feel confident when thinking about the future, which creates an internal contradiction in a significant part of respondents between expectation as a desire for a better life in the future and expectation as confidence in the realization of this desire. It is possible to identify a subgroup of those who expect life to improve and confidently think about the future – 34%. This means that those who remain in one context or another have doubts about improving the future.

Conclusion

The revealed trends in assessing happiness in one's life, depending on the time perspective, show that at the moment in Russian society there is an inclined trajectory of life satisfaction over time. This trend of perceived improvement in life is applicable to many countries and has been documented in a number of studies. ^[21] However, recently, data have appeared in foreign publications on a change in this trend – for example, on the dominant perception of real life as happier and the lack of expectation of an increase in satisfaction in the near and distant future ^[22], on the increasing dependence of happiness on personal factors (such as assessing one's importance in various spheres), and non-generational features ^[23], etc.

From our point of view, the preservation of orientation towards the linearity of the relationship between happiness and the future is largely explained by the presence in Russians' ideas of happiness of elements characteristic of models of deferred happiness – the expectation of significant improvements in the future related to events in personal or public life, dissatisfaction with the completeness of self-realization or achievement of goals in the present, the perception of current life as incomplete in contrast to the future present life. 60.2% of the surveyed residents of Russian cities agree that their lives could be happier than they are, 85.8% believe that interesting and pleasant things await them in the future, 47.7% believe that they missed a lot in their past lives, 81.5% have experience of abandoning their own interests for the sake of comfort and well-being of loved ones.

Thus, the temporality of happiness is manifested both at the level of personal perception of life improvement, and in comparing the feeling of attributive and current levels of happiness, and in generational assessments of subjective well-being and expectations of change. Further research on the topic may be related to the use of qualitative methods, which are rarely used to study happiness. ^[24] Narrative interview techniques based on highlighting biographical experience in the context of its temporal distribution, understanding the past through the present and future, and generalizing one's own life, will provide an expanded understanding of the dynamic characteristics of happiness and the manifestation of models of delayed happiness in the practices of Russians.