There is a small accounting error a lot of capable women run without noticing they are running it. It has to do with which good moments get counted.

A big good thing announces itself. The promotion, the trip, the milestone you have been aiming at for a year. It arrives with a category already attached: this counts, this is the kind of thing happiness is supposedly made of. So it gets weighed, anticipated, remembered.

The small good thing does not announce itself. The coffee that is actually hot. The conversation that went easily. The fifteen minutes when nobody needed anything. These pass unmarked, because they read as too minor to enter the ledger at all. And the quiet assumption underneath is that the real well-being is waiting in the big maybe, so the small certain thing is, at best, something to get through on the way there.

The research on positive emotion says the ledger has the weights close to backwards.

Frequency, not intensity

Begin with a finding that is old enough to have been tested many times over. When researchers separate how often a person feels good from how intensely they feel good at the peaks, it is the frequency that tracks with well-being, not the intensity.[1] The person who has a steady supply of mild, ordinary good moments tends to be doing better than the person who lives between rare, enormous highs. Intensity turns out to carry hidden costs: the strongest peaks often come packaged with steeper contrasts, so the high-amplitude life is not the reliably happier one.

Then there is the question of what people who are genuinely flourishing are actually doing differently. The intuitive answer is that better things happen to them. The evidence points elsewhere. In one diary study, community adults reconstructed their days and were followed up two to three months later.[2] The people who were flourishing were not having bigger positive events than everyone else. They were reacting more strongly to the small, ordinary ones: a task going smoothly, a bit of help given or received, an easy exchange. That greater reactivity to the minor stuff predicted how they were doing months on, controlling for where they started.

A separate month-long study fills in why this compounds rather than just feeling nice in the moment.[3] Everyday positive emotion (not global judgments about life, and not the mere absence of anything bad) predicted growth in resilience, and that resilience predicted rising life satisfaction a month later. The small good moments were not decoration on top of well-being. They were building the thing.

The big maybe, weighed honestly

It is worth being careful here, because the tidy version of this argument overreaches, and the overreach is the part people rightly distrust.

The classic study on this is the one about lottery winners, from 1978, and it is often cited as if it settled the matter: a windfall does nothing, everyone returns to baseline, chasing the big win is pointless.[9] The actual study was small, and a later review complicated the neat reading of it. Set points are not fixed and neutral for everyone; they differ by person, and they can shift under some conditions.[10] So the honest claim is narrower than the meme. It is not that a big uncertain win never matters, or that ambition is a mistake. It is that the lasting emotional payoff of the big maybe tends to be smaller and shorter-lived than it looks from where you are standing before it arrives.

Which changes what the small certain thing is. It is not the consolation prize you accept because the real thing did not come through. It is not settling. When the evidence says frequency does more work than intensity, banking the guaranteed small good moment today is not a failure of ambition. It is closer to reading the odds correctly.

Savoring is the actual variable

If the small moments do this much, the obvious next question is whether you can do anything about them, or whether some people are just built to notice more. Here the more recent work is encouraging, because the thing that seems to matter is not a fixed trait but a skill: savoring, meaning deliberately noticing and prolonging a good experience instead of letting it slide past.

Savoring capacity tracks with happiness, lower depression, and higher life satisfaction, and in one study the association was strongest for people lower in baseline resilience: it may matter most for those already under strain, not least.[5] And it is trainable, not just a disposition you either have or lack. A short savoring practice raised life satisfaction and positive affect and lowered negative affect over a couple of weeks.[4]

Two findings make me take this more seriously than the usual self-report loop. In an EEG study, a savoring intervention changed the brain's own reward-related response, and that shift tracked with lower depressive symptoms, which is harder to dismiss as people simply reporting what they think they should.[6] And savoring training generalized: people who practiced on some positive images showed the effect on novel ones they had never worked on, which is what you would expect from a general skill rather than a trick tied to one nice thing.[7]

There is also a structure to the small moments worth savoring, not a random scatter. When researchers mapped the everyday positive experiences people actually report, they found a coherent pattern of small, repeatable ones: contact with nature, time with close people, quiet downtime, a chore going right.[8] Ordinary, low-stakes, available most days. The kind of thing easy to file as too small to count.

Where this lands

I am wary, as ever, of turning this into a technique, and doubly wary of the version currently for sale, where small joys become a consumer category and savoring becomes one more thing to be good at. That is not the point, and it is not what the research says. The research does not say buy nicer moments. It says the modest ones already in your day are carrying more of the weight than you have been giving them credit for, and that noticing them on purpose is a real variable, not a platitude.

This sits close to something MoMo has written about before: that treating rest and the small good thing as unearned is usually a miscount, not a moral truth. The suspicion that the small certain pleasure is a lesser thing than the big uncertain one is understandable. It is also, on the evidence, pointed at the wrong quantity.

You do not have to do anything dramatic with that. Letting the hot coffee, the easy conversation, the unclaimed fifteen minutes actually register as they happen, rather than only counting the moments loud enough to announce themselves, is most of it. Holding those noticings across days, so the pattern of what reliably lifts a given week becomes visible instead of forgotten, is part of what MoMo was built for. But that is a footnote. The essay is the accounting error, and which good moments you have been declining to count.

References

Diener, E., Colvin, C. R., Pavot, W. G., & Allman, A. (1991). The psychic costs of intense positive affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(3), 492–503. PMID: 1941521.
Catalino, L. I., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2011). A Tuesday in the life of a flourisher: the role of positive emotional reactivity in optimal mental health. Emotion, 11(4), 938–950. DOI: 10.1037/a0024889. PMID: 21859208.
Cohn, M. A., Fredrickson, B. L., Brown, S. L., Mikels, J. A., & Conway, A. M. (2009). Happiness unpacked: positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building resilience. Emotion, 9(3), 361–368. DOI: 10.1037/a0015952. PMID: 19485613.
Gao, M., Hashim, I. H. M., & Ostovar, S. (2025). Savoring promotes a balanced time perspective and subjective well-being among university students. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. DOI: 10.1111/aphw.70039. PMID: 40341802.
Smith, J. L., & Hollinger-Smith, L. (2015). Savoring, resilience, and psychological well-being in older adults. Aging & Mental Health, 19(3), 192–200. DOI: 10.1080/13607863.2014.986647. PMID: 25471325.
Irvin, K. M., Bell, D. J., Steinley, D., & Bartholow, B. D. (2022). The thrill of victory: savoring positive affect, psychophysiological reward processing, and symptoms of depression. Emotion, 22(6). DOI: 10.1037/emo0000914. PMID: 33252936.
Wilson, K. A., & MacNamara, A. (2024). Generalization of savoring to novel positive stimuli. Psychophysiology, 61(6). DOI: 10.1111/psyp.14537. PMID: 38333910.
Small but certain happiness in daily life: structure and relation with well-being. (2025). Journal of Happiness Studies. DOI: 10.1007/s10902-025-00896-2.
Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917. PMID: 690806.
Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61(4), 305–314. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305. PMID: 16719675.