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The ability to synthesize happiness
All human beings have this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some can do it more effectively.
- Freedom - the ability to make up your mind and change your mind - is a friend of natural happiness because it allows you to choose the one you would most enjoy.
- However, the freedom to choose and make up your mind is the enemy of synthetic happiness.
The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck because then we will find a way to be happy with what we have. When we still have options available, we will always wonder if we have made the best choice.
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Bounded and unbounded ambition
Our desires are often overblown. Of course, some things are better than others, but when our preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we overrate the difference between the two, we risk sacrificing things of real value.
When our ambition is bounded, we're prudent...
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77 reads
The importance of understanding synthetic happiness
In a Harvard study, students could join one of two photography courses where they can also develop two of their best photos, one for them and the other for headquarters.
- They could join the course where they had four days to decide which photo they wanted to keep.
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67 reads
Synthesising happiness
- Natural happiness is what we get when we obtain what we want.
- Synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we want.
In our society, we strongly believe that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Howev...
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90 reads
Impact Bias
Impact bias is the tendency to overestimate the hedonic impact of future events.
For example, consider two groups of people where one group won the lottery, and the other group became paraplegics. Data shows people of both groups are equally happy a year after the e...
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133 reads
Psychological immune system
In 1642, Sir Thomas Brown wrote that he is the happiest man alive. "I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles. Fortune hath not one place to hit me. "
All humans have the same remarkable notion
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CURATED FROM
CURATED BY
The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others.
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Psychological immune system & Synthetic happiness
- Natural happiness - what we get when we get what we wanted.
- Synthetic happiness - what we make when we don't get what we wanted. It is as real & enduring as natural happiness because our psychological immune system works best when we are stuck.
"Our longings and our worries are both
to some degree overblown,
because we have within us the capacity
to manufacture the very commodity
we are constantly chasing (happiness)
when we choose experience."
- DANIEL GILBERT
What Imprisons You
You need to make certain sacrifices and get out of your comfort zone to experience real freedom.
We can be imprisoned by certainty, by the lies we tell ourselves, even stuck with incompatible people. We can be caged with the fear of losing money, or expectations, or e...
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