Ever have a time when your mother or somebody offered advice that you really did not accept? She thinks you should go out for football and you hate the idea. Or, she thinks you should not go out for football and you hate that idea. I can think of advice my mother gave me that genuinely helped me and other advice that I refused. So far as I can tell, I took the right path in both cases. I wonder if she would agree.
Daniel Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist who specializes in people's predictions of their future happiness. In books, TED talks, and articles, he explains that most people expect to be more affected by a given future gain or loss, positive or negative event, than they turn out to be. He attributes this inaccuracy to our inability to experience a future event in the context of our whole, busy, active life. When we think of the Packers winning or lightning striking the chicken coop, we can only think of that event. We are not able mentally to think of the event embedded in the need to plan that wedding, attend a conference and do all the other things that will be on our minds and in our lives at that time. People tend to overestimate the mental acreage that a particular event will occupy in their lives.
It seems to relate to the matter of the happiness set point, again. In their memorable book, "Healthy Pleasures", Robert Ornstein and David Sobel explain that people who became paraplegics and people who won a lottery both tended to return to their previous levels of happiness within six months to a year of the big event.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
