Regarding the existing measures of ‘life satisfaction’ (and perhaps how to reinterpret them in minimalist terms), I should first note that I’m not very familiar with how they’re operationalized. But my hunch is that they might easily measure more of an ‘outside view’ of one’s entire life — as if one took a 3rd person, aggregative look at it — rather than a more direct, ‘inside view’ of how one feels in the present moment. And I think that at least for the experientialist minimalist views that were explored in the post, it might make more sense to think of such views as being focused on the inside view, i.e. on the momentary quality of one’s experiential state (which is explicitly the focus in tranquilism).
A problem with the ‘outside view’ could be that perhaps it becomes cognitively/emotionally inaccessible to us how we actually felt during times where we might have given a life satisfaction rating of 0⁄10 (or −5/10, or just a very “low” score), and thus we might effectively ignore their subjective weight (at the time) if we later attempt to aggregate over the varying degrees of frustration/satisfaction during our entire life. And if we as researchers care about how minimalist views would estimate the value of some wellbeing interventions, it’s worth noting that people with minimalist intuitions often see a theoretical or practical priority to reduce/prevent the most subjectively bad experiences. So perhaps a better practical wellbeing measure for (experientialist) minimalist views would be something like experience sampling — ideally such that it would capture how much people in fact appreciate the contrast in moving up from the lowest scores (and not only the perhaps relatively ‘non-relieving’ movement from 7–8, 8–9, or 9–10).
Regarding the existing measures of ‘life satisfaction’ (and perhaps how to reinterpret them in minimalist terms), I should first note that I’m not very familiar with how they’re operationalized. But my hunch is that they might easily measure more of an ‘outside view’ of one’s entire life — as if one took a 3rd person, aggregative look at it — rather than a more direct, ‘inside view’ of how one feels in the present moment. And I think that at least for the experientialist minimalist views that were explored in the post, it might make more sense to think of such views as being focused on the inside view, i.e. on the momentary quality of one’s experiential state (which is explicitly the focus in tranquilism).
A problem with the ‘outside view’ could be that perhaps it becomes cognitively/emotionally inaccessible to us how we actually felt during times where we might have given a life satisfaction rating of 0⁄10 (or −5/10, or just a very “low” score), and thus we might effectively ignore their subjective weight (at the time) if we later attempt to aggregate over the varying degrees of frustration/satisfaction during our entire life. And if we as researchers care about how minimalist views would estimate the value of some wellbeing interventions, it’s worth noting that people with minimalist intuitions often see a theoretical or practical priority to reduce/prevent the most subjectively bad experiences. So perhaps a better practical wellbeing measure for (experientialist) minimalist views would be something like experience sampling — ideally such that it would capture how much people in fact appreciate the contrast in moving up from the lowest scores (and not only the perhaps relatively ‘non-relieving’ movement from 7–8, 8–9, or 9–10).