Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

“What do you want to be now?”

Studies confirm what you probably suspect: When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.

Indeed, thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we’d rather think about it than get there.

Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit.

We like to frolic in the best of all imaginary tomorrows—and

Although imagining happy futures may make us feel happy, it can also have some troubling consequences.

we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.

fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.

We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it.

Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.

Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.

In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed,48 who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations.

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

We all steer ourselves toward the futures that we think will make us happy, but what does that word really mean?

We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be.

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.

Pain is pain, no matter what causes it.

comparing our new happiness with our memory of our old happiness is a risky way to determine whether two subjective experiences are really different.

Once we learn to read, we can never again see letters as mere inky squiggles.

Every day would be a repudiation of the day before, as we experienced greater and greater happiness and realized how thoroughly deluded we were until, conveniently enough, now.

Indeed, feelings don’t just matter—they are what mattering means.

Why do we so often fail to know what will make us happy in the future?

And the thing that’s wrong with both of us is that we make a systematic set of errors when we try to imagine “what it would feel like if.”

Our lives may not always turn out as we wish or as we plan, but we are confident that if they had, then our happiness would have been unbounded and our sorrows thin and fleeting.

We are forced to consider the possibility that what clearly seems to be the better life may actually be the worse life and that when we look down the time line at the different lives we might lead, we may not always know which is which.

the act of remembering involves “filling in” details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.

We believe what we see, and then unbelieve it when we have to.

The three-and-a-half-pound meat loaf between our ears is not a simple recording device but a remarkably smart computer that gathers information, makes shrewd judgments and even shrewder guesses, and offers us its best interpretation of the way things are. Because those interpretations are usually so good, because they usually bear such a striking resemblance to the world as it is actually constituted, we do not realize that we are seeing an interpretation.

The point here is that when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.

As we are about to see, when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed—and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.

we tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details—and with only the details—that the brain has imagined.

The Future Is Now

when brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of yesterday and tomorrow, they tend to use a material called today.

Curiosity is a powerful urge, but when you aren’t smack-dab in the middle of feeling it, it’s hard to imagine just how far and fast it can drive you.

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.

We can’t see or feel two things at once, and the brain has strict priorities about what it will see, hear, and feel and what it will ignore.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.

when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.

At some level we recognize that our friends are probably right. Nonetheless, when we try to overlook, ignore, or set aside our current gloomy state and make a forecast about how we will feel tomorrow, we find that it’s a lot like trying to imagine the taste of marshmallow while chewing liver.

28 It is only natural that we should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes us feel, but because our brains are hell-bent on responding to current events, we mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today.

Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective.

Such acts of imagination allow you to reason about the things you are imagining and hence solve important problems in the real world,

Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time. One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences

Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience.

The point here is that time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other.

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