Stumbling on Happiness

“Imagination’s tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us.”

• 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.
• Our experience is compressed as a summary phrase (“Dinner was disappointing”) or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter) in memory.

“Imagination’s tendency to project the present onto the future.”

• When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by filling in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present.

“Imagination’s failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen—in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better.”

• When we imagine losing a job, for instance, we imagine the painful experience (“The boss will march into my office, shut the door behind him . . .”) without also imagining how our psychological immune systems will transform its meaning (“I’ll come to realize that this was an opportunity to quit retail sales and follow my true calling as a sculptor”).

Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: “Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.”

1. One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences (“Hey, honey, I have a kinky idea—let’s watch the sun set from the kitchen this time”).
2. Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience. 

• People tend to see what they want to see.
• By controlling the sample of information to which they were exposed, these people indirectly controlled the conclusions they would draw.
• To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

• Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.
• Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.
• The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment, is to stop thinking so much about the future.