Stumbling on happiness- shows that people overestimate how happy they are going to be once they obtain the goal they are attempting to obtain, he uses an example of tenure and the statistics he shows how people who do not obtain tenure are happier overall than those who do. What is fascinating with our minds is that we have a way of exploiting ambiguity whether we were rejected for something we really wanted, not achieving the goals we set or not getting the date we were hoping for. The point he makes is that people rarely think about the things they didn’t do or did not happen to them, because this relates to what will you be doing tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, in that life goes on and we move forward with the choices we made and our day to day lives, this is our brains capability of being able to move us along so we can grow and not be stuck in a place just wondering what if. This ties into his conclusion why our predictions are wrong in regards to our happiness because our future when it arrives will be our present and we will be doing all the same things we were doing in our past only now we have achieved our goal and we are not as happy as we predicted we would be. The purpose in life is to strive to be happy not necessarily achieve it at the level we predicted, and while I find parenting to be frustrating and hard I am the fool that still thinks it is the best thing ever.
1 comment:
Stumbling on happiness- shows that people overestimate how happy they are going to be once they obtain the goal they are attempting to obtain, he uses an example of tenure and the statistics he shows how people who do not obtain tenure are happier overall than those who do. What is fascinating with our minds is that we have a way of exploiting ambiguity whether we were rejected for something we really wanted, not achieving the goals we set or not getting the date we were hoping for. The point he makes is that people rarely think about the things they didn’t do or did not happen to them, because this relates to what will you be doing tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, in that life goes on and we move forward with the choices we made and our day to day lives, this is our brains capability of being able to move us along so we can grow and not be stuck in a place just wondering what if. This ties into his conclusion why our predictions are wrong in regards to our happiness because our future when it arrives will be our present and we will be doing all the same things we were doing in our past only now we have achieved our goal and we are not as happy as we predicted we would be. The purpose in life is to strive to be happy not necessarily achieve it at the level we predicted, and while I find parenting to be frustrating and hard I am the fool that still thinks it is the best thing ever.
Post a Comment