Who will you be in 10 years? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably immediately answer that you’ll be pretty much the same, just a little older and (hopefully!) wiser. But according to psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of the wonderful Stumbling on Happiness, you’ll actually be a far different person that you imagine. Why? Because we live with the convenient and helpful myth that the person we are today is our “true” self, the self toward which everything up to now has been pointing. It’s a convenient myth in that it doesn’t take much effort to maintain and doesn’t require us to anticipate changing all that much, and...

Name the one thing that, if you could get it tomorrow, would make you totally happy. If you’re at all like me, you probably had no trouble thinking of something. Or, actually, if you had a problem, it was limiting yourself to just one thing. And therein lies the key, actually, to our unhappiness. Somewhere along the line, we bought into the idea that if we could only get a little more we’d be happy. A little more money, a little more vacation time, a little better car or house, a little better job, a fancy new gadget… any of these things – depending on who you are – will make you happy. But it’s a lie. A lie constructed by our...

I came across this TEDTalk after I read Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. In it he offers a great summary of his major thesis: that we misremember many of our experiences and therefore are poor predictors of what makes us happy. But there’s an upside: we’re actually very good at creating what he calls “synthetic” happiness by almost always looking at the bright side. In a reverse of the “sour grapes” phenomenon – perhaps we should call it the “lemonade” phenomenon 🙂 – we are hardwired to make the best of our situations. And if we trust that rather than think we can make...

Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Despite what the title might sound like, it’s not a self-help book. And, to tell you the truth, it’s not really about happiness. It’s actually about what makes us unhappy. In particular, it’s about why we are often so poor at predicting what will make us happy. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to...