Really interesting article in yesterday's Oregonian written by Shankar Vedantam of the LA Times Washington Post news service. The article was titled "Pushing Happiness Can Make You Sad." The article was subtitled, "Our minds are designed to see "now" not future fulfullment so we often make bad life choices." Much of the information in the article is based on a published study done by Harvard pyschologist Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert has studied why people not only make errors in predicting what will make them happy. but also why they make the same errors again and again.
The opening paragraph "Think ahead to December 31, 2008. What are your hopes for the next 12 months? Maybe you want to be richer or slimmer, get married or divorced, become gainfully employed or thankfully retired. A single word describes this goals. They are all ways, ultimately, to make you happy.
The more interesting question, according to the article, is: Why do people who get what they want rarely end up as happy as they expected, while those who fail to achieve dreams rarely end up unhappy as they feared? Systematic experiments show that as strongly as we hold on to our dreams and fear our setbacks, we are poor judges of what will make us happy and unhappy.
Gilbert states that our inability to accurately predict what will make us happy stems from thought processes that people are more or less stuck with - our minds are designed to see the world as it is now, rather than from the point of view that we will become.
Some of the rules to live by.
1. Binging is bad, except when it isn't. Spread good things out over time. The first million you make is more important than the second.
2. Happiness often comes from what you don't know. For example, people who received gifts for no apparent reason felt happier than those who received identical gifts for reasons tat were clear. People also reported more pleasure when they got a compliment without knowing who said it.
3. Keeping your options open won't necessarily make you happier.
4. The things you fear are not as bad as you think. Gilbert found that people overestimate how unhappy they will be after a tragic event.
Gilbert goes on to say that we fail to predict how happy and unhappy we will be because we base our estimates of our future happiness on the people we are today and fail to appreciate not only that we will be different tomorrow, but that the things we seek will change us.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/stories/index.ssf?/base/living/1199755511264660.xml&coll=7
After reading the article I decided that of us single folks don't really know what we want in the dating life but yet we still put people in catergories. Those we are interested in and those we aren't interested in. Then we proceed to go right to the people we are interested in while walking right by the people that are interested in us and often end up disappointed. The truth of the matter is that the ones interested in us may have well been a better fit for us.
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5 comments:
I like your thought about being careful about focussing on what you THINK you want, and ignoring other possibilities.
Plus there's always that great saying by somebody-or-other - Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
Hi Mary Z
I'm just going to quit wishing for things, try to force happiness, and just try living for a change.
Sounds a good plan to me. I hope it works for you.
Glad you liked Juno - I absolutely loved the dialogue. My mantra for 2008 is peaceful easy living. Living peacefully and easily in the moment. Oh yes, and focusing on what I'm grateful for - and when I do those things, I find I am happy in the moment - and that's plenty for me!
Peaceful easy living sounds great to me.
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