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To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine—ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be.
Surprise is an emotion we feel when we encounter the unexpected—for
He seems to be living in a ‘permanent present.’
Be Here Now,
The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.
Happiness, then, is the you-know-what-I-mean feeling.
People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.
one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.
Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.
Starting points matter because we often end up close to where we started.
performing a simultaneous task such as this one causes people to stay very close to their starting points.
have a job at which they earned $30,000 the first year, $40,000 the second year, and $50,000 the third year, or a job at which they earned $60,000 then $50,000 then $40,000, they generally prefer the job with the increasing wages, despite the fact that they would earn less money over the course of the three years.
economic arguments fall on deaf ears because human beings don’t think in absolute dollars. They think in relative dollars,
Marketers, politicians, and other agents of influence know about our obsession with relative magnitudes and routinely turn it to their own advantage.
When I encounter a $2.89 cup of coffee, it’s all too easy for me to recall what I paid for coffee the day before and not so easy for me to imagine all the other things I might buy with my money.
Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.
Rather than deciding whether to spend money, you were deciding how to spend money, and all the possible ways of spending your money were laid out for you by the nice folks who wanted it.
Our side-by-side comparisons can be influenced by extreme possibilities such as extravagant wines and dilapidated houses, but they can also be influenced by the addition of extra possibilities that are identical to those we are already considering.
One of the most insidious things about side-by-side comparison is that it leads us to pay attention to any attribute that distinguishes the possibilities we are comparing.
The same principle explains why we love new things when we buy them and then stop loving them shortly thereafter.
people expect losing a dollar to have more impact than gaining a dollar,
For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them.
the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.
When people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job or a romantic partner, if their candidate loses an important election or their team loses an important game, if they flub an interview, flunk an exam, or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.
psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness.
A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it (“Yeah, that was a lousy performance and I feel crummy about it, but I’ve got enough confidence to give it a second shot”).
Our tendency to expose ourselves to information that supports our favored conclusions is especially powerful when it comes to choosing the company we keep.
When we expose ourselves to favorable facts, notice and remember favorable facts, and hold favorable facts to a fairly low standard of proof, we are generally no more aware of our subterfuge than Osten was of his.
Most of us will pay a premium today for the opportunity to change our minds tomorrow, and sometimes it makes sense to do so.
Explanations allow us to make full use of our experiences, but they also change the nature of those experiences.
Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it.
