Word: transients
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Sometimes one commits a rant to paper. That is almost always a mistake. A rant should be transient. It should blow away like sudden, violent weather...
...less delicate instruments than V-E day for reinforcing NATO. And surely there are limits to alliance politics. At this point President Reagan is reluctant to change his plans because of the acute embarrassment it would cause the German government. But that injury is certain to be more transient than the injury to memory that would result from sticking to his plans...
...course, besides the transient fears of being sideswiped, rear-ended, or run off the road, my lingering apprehension is that the Boston driving style will somehow rub off—that I’ll somehow become hesitant and aimless, like so many of my fellow drivers. I fear that soon the transformation will be so complete that I won’t survive on the streets of my own city...
Researchers have devised other tools to look at more transient moods. Csikszentmihalyi pioneered a method of using beepers and, later, handheld computers to contact subjects at random intervals. A pop-up screen presents an array of questions: What are you doing? How much are you enjoying it? Are you alone or interacting with someone else? The method, called experience sampling, is costly, intrusive and time consuming, but it provides an excellent picture of satisfaction and engagement at a specific time during a specific activity...
Seligman, in contrast, puts the emphasis on the remembering self. "I think we are our memories more than we are the sum total of our experiences," he says. For him, studying moment-to-moment experiences puts too much emphasis on transient pleasures and displeasures. Happiness goes deeper than that, he argues in his 2002 book Authentic Happiness. As a result of his research, he finds three components of happiness: pleasure ("the smiley-face piece"), engagement (the depth of involvement with one's family, work, romance and hobbies) and meaning (using personal strengths to serve some larger end). Of those three...