Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

When they imagine the future, there is a whole lot missing, and the things that are missing matter.

The nondescribers were focused on one and only one aspect of the future—the outcome of the football game—and they failed to imagine other aspects of the future that would influence their happiness, such as drunken parties and chemistry exams.

Yet, research shows that Californians are actually no happier than anyone else—so why does everyone (including Californians) seem to believe they are?

because we imagine California with so few details—and we make no allowance for the fact that the details we are failing to imagine could drastically alter the conclusions we draw.

But whatever a blind person’s life is like, it is about much more than blindness.

And yet, when sighted people imagine being blind, they fail to imagine all the other things that such a life might be about, hence they mispredict how satisfying such a life can be.

When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.

But when we remember or imagine a temporally distant event, our brains seem to overlook the fact that details vanish with temporal distance,

When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes.

“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”2

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present.

people misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did, and said what they now think, do, and say.

More simply said, most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today,

The region of your brain that is normally activated when you see objects with your eyes—a sensory area called the visual cortex—is also activated when you inspect mental images with your mind’s eye.

imagine sounds, they show activation in a sensory area of the brain called the auditory cortex, which is normally activated only when we hear real sounds with our ears.

we send information about the object from our memory to our visual cortex, and we experience a mental image.

so do you generate a mental image of an infidelity and then emotionally react to it in order to answer questions about your future feelings.

The point here is that we generally do not sit down with a sheet of paper and start logically listing the pros and cons of the future events we are contemplating, but rather, we contemplate them by simulating those events in our imaginations and then noting our emotional reactions to that simulation. Just as imagination previews objects, so does it prefeel events.

why do you close your eyes when you want to visualize an object, or jam your fingers in your ears when you want to remember the melody of a certain song? You do these things because your brain must use its visual and auditory cortices to execute acts of visual and auditory imagination, and if these areas are already busy doing their primary jobs—namely, seeing and hearing things in the real world—then they are not available for acts of imagination.

Future events may request access to the emotional areas of our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way.

experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called feeling;

the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called prefeeling; and mixing them up is one of the world’s most popular sports.

they mistook reality-induced feelings for imagination-induced prefeelings.

ineffective. Like the sponge, we think we are thinking outside the box only because we can’t see how big the box really is.

Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception.

Our extraordinary talent for creating mental images of concrete objects is one of the reasons why we function so effectively in the physical world.1

they suggest that when he was asked to imagine the future event, he began by imagining the event as though it were happening in the present and only then considered the fact that the event would take place in the future, when maturity will have taken its inevitable toll on his eyesight and his libido.

Starting points matter because we often end up close to where we started.

Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will.16

“Can people detect five ounces?” because brains do not detect ounces, they detect changes in ounces and differences in ounces, and the same is true for just about every physical property of an object.

your bank account contains absolute dollars and not “percentages off.” If it is worth driving across town to save $50, then it doesn’t matter which item you’re saving it on because when you spend these dollars on gas and groceries, the dollars won’t know where they came from.

But after just a few days of wearing our new sunglasses we stop comparing them

with the old pair, and—well, what do you know? The delight that the comparison produced evaporates.

the word presentism to describe the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards.

And yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming.

Because predictions about the future are made in the present, they are inevitably influenced by the present.

thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today.

Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.

most folks do pretty darn good when things go pretty darn bad.

“Chronically ill and disabled patients generally rate the value of their lives in a given health state more highly than do hypothetical patients [who are] imagining themselves to be in such states.”

and one of the many things that distinguishes us from rats and pigeons is that we respond to the meanings of such stimuli and not to the stimuli themselves.

We are not merely spectators of the world but investors in it,

the human mind naturally exploits each word’s ambiguity for its own gratification.

A toaster, a firm, a university, a horse, and a senator are all just fine and dandy, but when they become our toaster, firm, university, horse, and senator they are instantly finer and dandier.

Studies such as these suggest that people are quite adept at finding a positive way to view things once those things become their own.

there are more ways to think about experience than there are experiences to think about,

Analogously, when we face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, and failure, the psychological immune system must not defend us too well (“I’m perfect and everyone is against me”) and must not fail to defend us well enough (“I’m a loser and I ought to be dead”). 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”).

On the contrary, we spend countless hours and countless dollars carefully arranging our lives to ensure that we are surrounded by people who like us, and people who are like us. It isn’t surprising, then, that when we turn to the folks we know for