I'm not sure this is the best application of a survivorship bias. I believe the point holds even when survivability is not a factor.
>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)
I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.
>Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function.
No, sorry, that was not my intent at all. My point was to get you out of thinking of well-being as a purely psychological phenomenon.
Dead people have no well-being at all. Many advances improve our well-being in an objective sense by keeping more of us alive longer. This is not a psychological effect.
And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond.
>And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond
What is the correlation to outcomes? Are you saying a negative outlook correlates to higher survivability so we are primed to view everything through a more negative lens?
That makes sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view, but doesn’t explain why we the well being wanes rather than just stays low from the onset.
>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)
I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.