You know too much about yourself

There's a second half to the unfairness, and it concerns what you know about yourself.

You have a complete record of your own life. You know about the argument in the car on the way to the housewarming. You know what's in the overdraft, what you said to your mother in March and how long it is since you opened the post. You know about the evening last week when you ate cereal standing up, and the email you still haven't answered. Nobody else knows most of this, and you know it all the time.

That record is what you hold up against your friend's Saturday. On one side there's a life known from the inside, with every dull and shameful minute included. On the other there's a life seen from the outside at its most prepared. These aren't two measurements of the same kind. It's like setting the estate agent's photographs of their house against a walk round yours on a Tuesday night with the big light on.

People sometimes answer that they'd settle for the outside of her life, thanks. That brings me to a second problem, which is what you were looking at.

In 1998 David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman asked large samples of students in the American Midwest and in Southern California to rate their satisfaction with life. Some rated their own. Others rated what they imagined for a student like themselves living in the other region. The two groups reported the same satisfaction with their own lives. But students in both places expected Californians to be happier. Climate and cultural opportunities accounted for the difference they predicted.

The authors called this a focusing illusion. When you judge a life from a distance, you give most weight to whatever is visible and different, and sunshine is both. The students rated climate as mattering more for someone in the other region than for someone in their own. For the people who actually live under it, the weather is a small part of a day that's mostly filled with the same things as anyone's.

The kitchen is your friend's sunshine. It's the part of her life you can see, and it differs from yours, so it carries your whole verdict. But her life is mostly made of things that were never on show at the housewarming. You didn't see her commute, her boss or her back. You didn't see her father's memory, her marriage on a Wednesday or her three o'clock in the morning. I've no idea how those are going, and neither have you, which is my whole point. You judged her life by its most visible feature, and then you judged your own by all of its features.

You may still think you'd be happier with the kitchen. You might be, a bit, and for a while. Wanting a nicer kitchen is a perfectly good want, and chapter 12 is about taking wants like that seriously. What doesn't hold up is the chain of reasoning on the ring road. It went from "her kitchen is better" to "her life is better" to "I'm failing". The first link is a fact. The second is a guess built on a very thin slice. The third doesn't follow even if the second were true.

Try turning it round. Think of the last time you had people over. You tidied, you cooked the thing you're good at, and you were funny because you'd had a glass of wine and you like these people. You didn't mention the overdraft. For that evening your guests saw the edited version of you, and it looked good. I'd bet that at least one person has driven home from your place feeling the dip. They were wrong about your life in exactly the way you've been wrong about your friend's.