Stumbling on Happiness

By Daniel Gilbert, 2006

Prospection = the act of looking forward in time or considering the future.
We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.
-> The Joy of Next
The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about future. But, what exactly does "making future" mean? Predictions.
The frontal lobe of human brain, the last part of the brain to evolve and the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age, is  a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens. No other animal has a frontal lobe quite like ours.
Why do our brains stubbornly insist on projecting us into the future when there is so much stuff to think about right here today?
The most obvious answer to that question is that thinking about the future can be pleasurable, that sometimes we'd rather think about it than get there. Two reasons. First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize ther impact. The second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.
Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain, this is why o ur brains stubbornly insist on churning out thoughts of the future, but most important is because 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, 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. And occasionally dead. Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.

Subjectivity = the fact that experience is unobservable to everyone but the person having it.
The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things: emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Emotional happiness is the most basic, is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state, thus it has no objective referent in the physical world. It is the feeling when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover's shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in high school but haven't heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine. These feelings are different, of course, but they also have something in common. A piece of real estate is not the same as a share of stock, which is not the same as an ounce of gold, but all are forms of wealth that occupy different points on a scale of value. Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the promotion experience, but both all forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness.
One of the problems is that many people consider the desire of happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement: something we all have, but not something of which we should be especially proud. The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base, that cannot possibly be the basis of a meaningful human life. You might tempted to conclude that the word happiness does not indicate a good feeling but rather that it indicates a very special good feeling that can only be produced by very special means. That would be the kind of feeling one wouldn't be ashamed to strive for. The Greeks had a word for this kind of happiness - eudaimonia - which translates literally as "good spirit" but which porbably means something more like "human flourishing" or "life well lived". For Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the only thing that could induce that kind of happiness was the virtuous performance of one's duties. The ancient Athenian legislator Solon suggested that one could not say that a person was happy until the person's life has ended because happiness is the result of living up to one's potential -- how can we make such a judgment until we see how the whole thing turns out? A few centuries later, Christian theologians added to this classical conception: happiness was not merely the product of a life of virtue but the reward for a life of virtue, and that reward was not necessarily to be expected in this lifetime.
But, if living one's life virtuously is a cause of happiness, it is not happiness itself.
A nazi war criminal who is basking on an Argentinean beach is not really happy, whereas the pious missionary who is being eaten alive by cannibals is. Cicero wrote in the first century BC, "Happiness will not tremble, however much it is tortured.
Happiness is a word that we generally use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it. Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.

If we were to agree to reserve the word happiness to refer to that class of subjective emotional experiences that are vaguely described as enjoyable or pleasurable, and if we were to promise not to use that same word to indicate the morality of the actions, one might take to induce those experiences or to indicate our judgments about the merits of those experiences, we might still wonder whether the happiness one gets from helping a little old lady across the street constitutes a different kind of emotional experience -- bigger, better, deeper -- than the happiness one gets from eating a slice of banana-cream pie. 

Perhaps the way to determine whether a pair of happinesses actually feel different is to forget about comparing the experiences of different minds and just ask someone who has experienced them both. Our remembrance of things past is imperfect, thus comparing our new happiness with our memory of our old happiness is a risky way to determine whether two subjective experiences are really different.

Outside Looking In
Before we can decide whether to accept people's claims about their happiness, we must first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they feel. Ca we believe we are feeling something we aren't?

Researchers studied the reactions of some young men who were crossing a long, narrow, suspension bridge constructed of wooden boards and wire cables that rocked and swayed 230 feet above Capilano River in North Vancouver. A young woman approached each man and asked if he would mind competing a survey, and after he did so, the woman gave the man her telephone number and offered to explain her survey project in greater detail if he called. Here's the catch: the woman approached some of these young men as they were crossing the bridge and others only after they had crossed it. As it turned out, the men who had met the woman in the middle of the shaky, swaying suspension bridge, who were experiencing intense physiological arousal (which they would normally have identified as fear), were much more likely to call her in the coming days, because they were being interviewed by an attractive woman, they mistakenly identified their arousal as sexual attraction.

The novelist Graham Greene wrote: "Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love." Indeed, research shows that physiological arousal can be interpreted in many ways, and our interpretation of our arousal depends on what we believe caused it. It is possible to mistake fear for lust, apprehension for guilt, shame for anxiety. It is possible to believe we are felling something when we are actually feeling nothing at all.
The distinction between experience and awareness is elusive because most of the time they hang together. Our visual experience and our awareness of that experience are generated by different part of our brains, and as such, certain kinds of brain damage can impair one without imparing the other, causing experience and awareness to lose their normally tight grip on each other. The dissociation between awareness and experience can cause the same sort of spookiness with regard to our emotions. Some people seem to be keenly aware of their moods and feelings, and may even have a novelist's gift for describing their every shad and flavor. Others come equipped with a somewhat more basic emotional vocabulary that consists primarily of good, not so good, and I already told you.  If our expressive deficit is so profound and protracted that it even occurs outside of football season, we may be diagnosed with alexithymia, which literally means "absence of words to describe emotional states." When alexithymics are asked what they are feeling, they usually say "nothing" and when they are asked how they are feeling, they usually say "I don't know". Alas, theirs is not a malady that can be cured by a pocket thesaurus or a short course in word power, because alexithymics do not lack the traditional affective lexicon so much as they lack introspective awareness of their emotional states. They seem to have feelings, they just don't seem to know about them. For instance, when researches show volunteers emotionally evocative pictures of amputations and car wrecks, the physiological responses of alexithymics are indistinguishable from those of normal people. Some evidence suggests that alexithymia is caused by a dysfunction of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a part of the brain known to mediate our awareness of many things, including our inner states. The decoupling of awareness and emotional experience can give rise to what we might call numbfeel. Apparently, it is possible -- at least for some poeple sometimes -- to be happy, sad, bored, or curious, and not know it.
The nature of subjective experience suggests there will never be a happyometer - a perfectly reliable instrument that allows an observer to measure with complete accuracy the characteristics of another person's subjective experience so that the measurement can be taken, recorded, and compared with another.  Given the importance of feelings, it would be nice to be able to say precisely what they are and how one might measure them.

Realism = the belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind
In the blind spot of the mind's eye.
Imagination is a powerful tool that allows us to conjure images from "airy nothing." But like all tools, this one has its shortcomings. The best way to understand this shortcoming of imagination is to understand the shortcomings of memory and perception. The shortcoming that causes us to misremember the past and misperceive the present is the very same shortcoming that causes us to misimagine the future. That shortcoming is caused by a trick that your brain plays on you every minute of every hour of every day -- a trick that your brain is playing on you right now.
Theory of realism was described in 1690 by the philosopher John Locke:
when our senses do actually convey into our understandings any idea, we cannot but be satisfied that there doth something at that time really exist without us, which doth affect our senses, and by them give notice of itself to our apprehensive faculties, and actually produce that idea which we then perceive: and we cannot so far distrust their testimony, as to doubt that such collections of simple ideas as we have observed by our senses to be united together, do really exist together.  
In other words, brains believe, but they don't make believe.
But in 1781 a German Professor Immanuel Kant's new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. Kant wrote "the understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing, only through their union can knowledge arise."
The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant's point in a single sentence: "The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost -- one might say -- a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.
Kant argued that a person's perception of a floating head is constructed from the person's knowledge of floating heads, memory of floating heads, belief in floating heads, need for floating heads, and sometimes -- but not always -- from the actual presence of a floating head itself.
Perceptions are potraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.
This theory was a revelation, and in the centuries that followed, psychologists extended it by suggesting that each individual makes roughly the same journey of discovery that philosophy did.
But if realism goes away, it doesn't get very far. Adults act like realists under certain circumstances. Even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism. We automatically assume that our subjective experience of a thing is a faithful representation of the thing's properties. Only later -- if we have the time, energy, and ability -- do we rapidly repudiate that assumption and consider the possibility that the real world may not actually be as it appears to us.
Piaget described realism as "a spontaneous and immediate tendency to confuse the sign and the thing signified." This tendency to equate our subjectivity sense of things with the objective properties of those things remains spontaneous and immediate throughout our lives. Rather, it is brief, unarticulated, and rapidly unraveled, but it is always the first step in our perception of the world. We believe what we see, and then unbelieve it when we have to.
The psychologist George Miller wrote, "The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world."
We tend to forget that our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthenticity is rarely detected. Each of us is a counterfeiter who prints phony dollar bills and then happily accepts them for payment, unaware that he is both the perpetrator and victim of a well-orchestrated fraud. As you are about to see, we sometimes pay a steep price for allowing ourselves to lose sight of this fundamental fact, because the mistake we make when we momentarily ignore the filling-in trick and unthingkingly accept the validity of our memories and our perceptions is precisely the same mistake we make when we imagine our futures.

Research suggests that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of imagination.
Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

When the humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed - and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize. When ordinary people want to know whether two things are causally related, they routinely search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did happen and fail to search for, attend to, consider, and remember information what did not. Our inability to think about absences can lead us to make some fairly bizarre judgments. The tendency to ignore absences can befuddle more personal decisions as well. When we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, anad when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes.

Our inattention to absences influences the way that we think about the future. Just as we do not remember every detail of past event or see every detail of a current event, so do we fail to imagine every detail of a future event. The tendency that causes us to overestimate the happiness of Californians also causes us to underestimate the happiness of people with chronic illnesses or disabilities.

When we think of events int he 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.
Seeing in time is like seeing in space. But there is one important difference between spatial and temporal horizons. When we remember or imagine a temporally distant event, our brains seem to overlook the fact that details vanish with temporal distance, and they conclude instead that the distant events actually are as smooth and vague as we are imagining and remembering them. For example, have you ever wondered why you often make commitments that you deeply regret when the moment to fulfill them arrives?
The fact that we imagine the near and far futures with such different textures causes us to value them differently as well. The vivid detail of the near future makes it much more palpable than the far future, thus we feel more anxious and excited when we imagine events that will take place soon than when we imagine events that will take place later. Studies show that the parts of the brain that are primarily responsible for generating feelings of pleasurable excitement become active when people imagine receiving a reward such as money in the near future but not when they imagine receiving the same reward in the far future.

Presentism = the tendency for current experience to influence one's views of the past and the future.
When dating couples try to recall what they thought about their romantic partners two months earlier, they tend to remember that they felt then as they feel now. When widows are asked how much grief they felt when their spouse died five years earlier, their memories are influenced by the amount of grief they currently feel. People misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did, and said what they now think, do and say. This tendency to fill in the holes in our memories of the past with material from the present is especially powerful when it comes to remembering our emotions.
If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no wals. Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick, and if the present lightly colors our remembered pasts, it thoroughly infuses our imagined futures. Most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want, or feel differently than we do now.

The power of prefeeling.
Prefeeling often allows us to predict our emotions better than logical thinking does. Prefeeling allowed nonthinkers to predict their future satisfaction more accurately than thinkers did. When people are prevented from feeling emotion in the present, they become temporarily unable to predict how they will feel in the future. But prefeeling has limits. How we feel when we imagine something is not always a good guide to how we will feel when we see, hear, wear, own, drive, eat, or kiss it.  Future events may request access to the emotional areas of our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way. 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. Imagination's requests are often denied. Both the sensory and emotional systems enforce this policy, and yet, we seem to recognize when the sensory systems are turning down imagination's requests but fail to recognize when the emotional system is doing the same.
The emotional 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.
In one study, researchers telephoned people in different parts of the country and asked them how satisfied they were with their lives. When people who lived in cities that happened to be having nice weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively happy; but when people who lived in cities that happened to be having bad weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively unhappy. These people tried to answer the researcher's question by imagining their lives and then asking themselves how they felt when they did so. Their brains enforced the Reality First policy and insisted on reacting to real weather instead of imaginary lives. But apparently, these people didn't know their brains were doing this and thus they mistook reality-induced feelings for imagination-induced prefeelings.

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

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. 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.

SpaceThink

when people need to reason about something abstract, they tend to imagine something concrete that the abstract thing is like and then reason about that instead. For most of us, space is the concrete thing that time is like. People all over the world imagine time as though it were a spatial dimension, which is why we say that the past is behind us and the future is in front of us, that we are moving toward our senescence and looking back on our infancy, and that days pass us by in much the same way that a flying Winnebago might. We think and speak as though we were actually moving away from a yesterday that is located over there and toward a tomorrow that is located 180 degree about.

When people predict future feelings by imagining a future events as though it were happening in the present and then correcting for the event's actual location in time, they make the same error. 

The fact that is is so much easier to remember the past than to generate the possible causes us to make plenty of weird decisions. People are more likely to purchase a vacation package that has been marked down from $600 to $500, than an identical package that costs $400 but that was on sale the previous day for $300. Because it is easier to compare a vacation package's price with its former price than with the price of other things one might buy, we end up preferring bad deals that have become decent deals to great deals that were once amazing deals.

We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of the possible. When we do compare with the possible, we still make mistakes. People generally don't like to buy the most expensive item in a category, hence retailers can improve their sales by stocking a few very expensive items that no one actually buys, but that make less expensive items seem like a bargain by comparison. Real estate agents bring buyers to dumps that are conveniently located between a massage parlor and a crack house before bringing them to the ordinary homes that they actually hope to sell, because the dumps make the ordinary homes seem extraordinary. 

One of the most insidious things about side-by-side comparison is that it leads us to pay attention to any attribute that distinguishes the possibilities we are comparing. 

Comparing and Presentism

What comparison means for our ability to imagine future feelings:

a). Value is determined by the comparison of one thing with another

b). There's more than one kind of comparison we can make in any given instance

c). We may value something more highly when we make one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison. 

These facts suggest that if we want to predict how something will make us feel in the future, we must consider the kind of comparison we will be making in the future and not the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present. 

In one study, volunteers were asked to sit at a table and predict how much they would enjoy eating potato chips a few minutes later. Some of them saw a bag of potato chips and a chocolate bar sitting on the table, others saw a bag of potato chips and a tin of sardines sitting on the table. Volunteers naturally compared the potato chips with this extraneous food, and they predicted they'd like eating the potato chips more when they compared the chips to the sardines than when they compared the chips to chocolate. But they were both wrong. Because when when volunteers actually ate the potato chips, the sardine tin and the chocolate bar that were sitting on the table had no influence whatsoever on their enjoyment of the chips. The same principles explains why we love new things when we buy them and then stop loving them shortly thereafter. When we shop for a new pair of sunglasses, we naturally contrast the hip, stylish ones in the store with the old, our dated ones that are sitting on our noses. So we buy the new ones and stick the old ones in a drawer. But after just a few days of wearing new sunglasses, we stop comparing them with the old pair, and, the delight that the comparison produced evaporates. 

The fact that we make different comparisons at different times -- but don't realize that we will do so -- helps explain some otherwise puzzling conundrums. Economists and psychologists have shown that people expect losing a dollar to have more impact than gaining a dollar, which is why most of us would refuse a bet that gives us an 85% chance of doubling our life savings and a 15% chance of losing it. The likely prospect of a big gain just don't compensate for the unlikely prospect of a big loss because we think losses are more powerful than equal-sized gains. But whether we think of something as a gain or a loss often depends on the comparisons we are making. The comparison we make have a profound impact on our feelings, and when we fail to recognize that the comparisons we are making today are not the comparisons we will make tomorrow, we predictably underestimate how differently we will feel in the future.

Immune to Reality

People are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one. When we cook facts, we are similarly unaware of why we are doing it, and this turns out to be a good thing, because deliberate attempts to generate positive views contain the seeds of their own destruction. 

People expect to feel equally bad when a tragic accident is the result of human negligence as when it is the result of dumb luck, but they actually feel worse when luck is dumb and no one is blameworthy. Ignorance of our psychological immune systems causes us to mispredict the circumstances under which we will blame others, but it also causes us to mispredict the circumstances under which we will blame ourselves.

Our most consequential choices (whether to marry, have children, buy a house, enter a profession, move abroad) are often shaped by how we imagine our future regrets. Regret is an emotion we feel when we blame ourselves for unfortunate outcomes that might have been prevented had we only behaved differently in the past, and because that emotion is decidedly unpleasant, our behavior in the present is often designed to preclude it. Most of us have elaborate theories about when and why people feel regret, and these theories allow us to avoid the experience. We expect to feel more regret when we learn about alternatives to our choices than when we don't, when we accept bad advice than when we reject good advice, when our bad choices are unusual rather than conventional, and when we fail by a narrow margin rather than by a wide margin. But sometimes these theories are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not spending enough time with family and friends. But why do people regret inactions more than actions? One reason is that the psychological immune system has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than of actions. When we accept a marriage proposal from someone who later becomes an axe murderer, we can console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience. But when our inaction causes us to reject a marriage proposal from someone who later becomes a movie star, we can't console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience because... well, there wasn't one. The irony is all too clear: because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge our bets when we should blunder forward. 

People have learned the hard way that a handful of iniquitous individuals can often cause more death and destruction than an invading army. To be effective, a defensive system must respond to threats; but to be practical, it must respond only to threats that exceed some critical threshold -- which means that threats that fall short of the critical threshold may have a destructive potential that belies their diminutive size. Unlike large threats, small threats can sneak in under the radar.

The psychological immune system is a defensive system, and it obeys this same principle. When experiences make us feel sufficiently unhappy, the psychological immune system cooks facts and shifts blame in order to offer us a more positive view. But it doesn't do this every time we feel the slightest tingle of sadness, jealousy, anger, or frustration. Failed marriages and lost jobs are the kinds of large-scale assaults on our happiness that trigger our psychological defenses, but these defenses are not triggered by broken pencils, stubbed toes, or slow elevators. The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience. Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures. Would it be worse if your best friend insulted you or insulted your cousin? If intense suffering triggers the psychological immune system and mild suffering does not, then over time you should be more likely to generate a positive view of an insult that was directed at you than one that was directed at your cousin. The irony is that you may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it. Apparently, people are not aware of the fact that their defenses are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering, thus they mispredict their own emotional reactions to misfortunes of different sizes.

Intense suffering is one factor that can trigger our defenses and thus influence our expereinces in ways we don't anticipate. But there are others. Why do we forgive our siblings for behaviour we would never tolerate in a friend? Why aren't we disturbed when the president does something that would have kept us from voting him had he done it before the election? Why do we overlook an employee's chronic tardiness but refuse to hire a job seeker who is two minutes late for the interview? One possibility is that blood is thicker than water, flags were made to be rallied around, and first impressions matter most. But another possibility is that we are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we're stuck with than of the things we're not.  Friends come and go, and changing candidates is as easy as changing stocks. But siblings and presidents are ours, for better or for worse, and there's not much we can do about it once they've been born or elected.  It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience.

The ability to associate pleasure or pain with its circumstances is so important that nature has installed that ability in every one of her creatures. To maximize our pleasures and minimize our pains, we must be able to associate our experiences with the circumstances that produced them, but we must also be able to explain how and why those circumstances produced the experiences they did. Explanations allow us to make full use of our experiences, but they also change the nature of those experiences. When experiences are unpleasant, we quickly move to explain them in ways that make us feel better. Studies show that mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help to defang it. Simply writing about a trauma -- such as the death of a loved one or a physical assault -- can lead to surprising improvements in both subjective well-being and physical health. What's more, the people who experience the greatest benefit from these writing exercises are those whose writing contains an explanation of the trauma.

But just as explanations ameliorate the impact of unpleasant events, so too do they ameliorate the impact of pleasant events. 

Unexplained events have two qualities that amplify and extend their emotional impact. First, they strike us as rare and unusual. Explanations allow us to understand how and why an event happened, which immediately allows us to see how and why it might happen again. Indeed, whenever we say that something can't happen -- for example, mind reading or levitation of a law that limits the power of incumbents -- we usually just mean that we'd have no way to explain it if it did. Unexplained events seem rare, and rare events naturally have a greater emotional impact than common events do. The second reason why unexplained events have a disproportionate emotional impact is that we are especially likely to keep thinking about them. People spontaneously try to explain events, and studies show that when people do not complete the things they set out to do, they are especially likely to think about and remember their unfinished business. Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory's drawer, and move on to the next one. But if an event defies explanation, it becomes a mystery or a conundrum --it is that they generally refuse to stay in the back of our minds. Filmmakers and novelists often capitalize on this fact by fitting their narratives with mysterious endings, and people are more likely to keep thinking about a movie when they can't explain what happened to the main character.  

Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them. Oddly enough, an explanation doesn't actually have to explain anything to have these effects -- it merely needs to seem as though it does. Apparently, even a fake explanation can cause us to tuck an event away and move along to the next one. 

Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case. People chose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery -- despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness. The poet John Keats noted that whereas great authors are "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, the rest of us are incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." Our relentless desire to explain everything that happens may well distinguish us from fruit flies, but it can also kill our buzz.

The eye and the brain are conspirators. We do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do not realize that we will do so again in the future. We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom. The processes by which we generate positive views are many: we pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically. These tendencies make it easy for us to explain unpleasant experiences in ways that exonerate us and make us feel better. The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them. 

Reporting live from tomorrow

if you believe that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, the one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel. Instead of remembering our past experience in order to stimulate our future experience, perhaps we should simply ask other people to introspect on their inner states. Perhaps we should give up on remembering and imagining entirely and use other people as surrogates of our future selves. A single randomly selected individual can sometimes provide a better basis for predicting your future experience than your own imagination can. 

Finding the Solution

No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important. We should have abandoned imagination altogether. 

Imagination's second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future. When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the derails are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by filing in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present. Imagination's third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen -- in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better (rationalization). When we imagine losing a job, we imagine the painful experience, without also imagining how our psychological immune systems will transform its meaning. 

When people are deprived of the information that imagination requires and are thus forced to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings, which suggests that the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today. 

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. The average person doesn't see herself as average. Ironically, the bias toward seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see ourselves as less biased than average too. This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others -- often for better but sometimes for worse. We don't always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we're doing it for unique reasons. 

Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates. After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe that people's emotional reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than it actually is. The irony is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one's future emotions, but because we don't realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be. 

Most of us make at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it. How are we to make these choices? 

In 1738, a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli claimed he had the answer. He suggested that the wisdom of any decision could be calculated by multiplying the probability that the decision will give us what we want tby the utility of getting what we want. By utility, Bernoulli meant something like goodness or pleasure. The first part of Bernoulli's prescription is fairly easy to follow because in most circumstances we can roughly estimate the odds that our choices will get us where we want to be. The problem is that we cannot easily estimate how we'll feel when we get it. Bernoulli's brilliance lay not in his mathematics but in his psychology -- in his realization that what we objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience when we get it (utility). Wealth may be measured by counting dollars, but utility must be measured by counting how much goodness those dollars buy.  Wealth doesn't matter; utility does. We don't care about money or promotions or beach vacations per se; we care about the goodness or pleasure that these forms of wealth may (or may not) induce. Wise choices are those that maximize our pleasure, not our dollars, and if we are to have any hope of choosing wisely, then we must correctly anticipate how much pleasure those dollars will buy us. Bernoulli knew that it was much easier to predict how much wealth a choice might produce than how much utility a choice might produce, so he devised a simple conversion formula that he hoped would allow anyone to translate estimates of the former into estimates of the latter. He suggested that each successive dollar provides a little less pleasure than the one before it, and that a person can therefore calculate the pleasure they will derive from a dollar simply by correcting for the number of dollars they already have.

The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields. The price of the item is dependent only on the thing itself and is equal for everyone; the utility, however, is dependent on the particular circumstances of the person making the estimate. Thus there is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats is more significant to a pauper than to a rich man though both gain the same amount. 

Bernaulli realized that people are sensitive to relative, but he also knew that translating wealth into utility was not as simple as he'd made it out to be, and that there were other psychological truths that his formula ignored.

Although a poor man generally obtains more utility than does a rich man from an equal gain, it is nevertheless conceivable, that a rich prisoner who possesses two thousand ducats but needs two thousand ducats more to repurchase his freedom, will place a higher value on a gain of two thousand ducats than does another man who has less money than he. 

Bernaulli was right in thinking the the hundredth dollar (or kiss or doughnut) generally does not make us happy as the first one did, but he was wrong in thinking that this was the only thing that distinguished wealth from utility and hence the only thing one mus correct for when predicting utility from wealth. There are many things other than the size of a a person's bank account that influence how much utility they derive from the next dollar. People often value things more after they own them than before, they often value things more when they are imminent than distant, they are often hurt more by small losses than by large ones, they often imagine that the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of getting it, and so on.

Yes, we should make choices by multiplying probabilities and utilities, but how can we possibly do this if we can't estimate those utilities beforehand? 

The sad fact is that converting wealth to utility isn't very much like converting meters to yards.  Without a formula for predicting utility, we tend to do what only our species does: imagine. Our brains have a unique structure that allows us to mentally transport ourselves into future circumstances and then ask ourselves how it feels to be there. Rather than calculating utilities with mathematical precision, we simply step into tomorrow's shoes and see how well they fit. Our ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen enables us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without making them. Yet, our ability to stimulate future selves and future circumstances is by no means perfect. When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

There is no simple formula for finding happiness.