Likelihood of Success

Be “happy”

Jan 10, 2010 Heart and spirit, Social networking

Everything you know about happiness is wrong, according to Professor Daniel Gilbert, who (unlike a lot of the professors quoted authoritatively in magazine articles) seems to have really made some strides in knowing what he’s talking about:

Gilbert ponders the subject that is known, thanks largely to him, as affective forecasting — the how and why and error of human perceptions of time, value, reward, sorrow, and, yes, happiness. Just as we often recall the past as we’d like to remember it instead of as it was, so do we predict incorrectly what the future will be like, including our emotional responses to it. This is important, he says, because it influences our attempts at planning — and we do it again and again. . . .

What’s responsible for our self-deception? According to Gilbert, blame imagination, because its forces and flaws distort our predictions and our recollections. Imagination works powerfully and quickly, he explains, but it tends to make us believe that the future we envision will be a lot like the present we are experiencing. And when we imagine an event in that future, he explains, we humans consistently overestimate the length and intensity of our emotional response to it. As he writes: “Teenagers get tattoos because they are confident that DEATH ROCKS will always be an appealing motto …” . . .

Gilbert has said that on an imaginary happiness scale of 0 to 100, humans tend to place themselves around the 75-point mark. Regardless of our baseline happiness “level,” a setback will drag us down the scale or some amazing stroke of luck bump us up, but only briefly — within a matter of months from the “life-changing” event, we’re pretty much right back where we started.

“Basically, the death of your entire family is the kind of event it takes to have a major impact on you for a very long time,” he says.
Can money buy happiness? Sort of. That is, a little more money can buy the poor a lot of happiness, but only a lot more money can buy the rich even a little happiness. Material wealth has, as Gilbert says, “very diminishing returns.” A far more reliable indicator of a person’s happiness is his or her wealth of personal relationships.

That’s “relationships.”  Not “followers.”