We're mostly miserable because we make bunky comparisons

I don't know how I feel about TED talks in general--some are outright scams, many just sorta lame--but this one is very interesting, and plausibly sort of cognitively world-changing.

Shortest version: We make ourselves miserable by making decisions based on invalid comparisons. Do you want to be happy? Then make each Right Now decision by imagining you're a year or so in the future looking back at that decision.

See also: The Two-Thousand-Dollar Popsicle : The New Yorker

FYI, at around the 29-minute mark, during the Q&A, the speaker (Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert) gets wonderfully zinged by a sociologist in the audience--which, for my money, is part of what makes this TED talk a solid winner (although I dispute the sociologists claim that one *cannot* get any pleasure from simply destroying a dollar).