THE MYTH: “we know what will make us happy”

By: Maria Gil THE MYTH:“we know what will make us happy”

INTRO • we = very poor at imagining the consequences of both happy and sad events • We = over-estimate both how unhappy we would be if something bad happened • and also how happy we will be if something good happens1

FIRST OF ALL…DO WE KNOW WHAT MAKES US HAPPY IN THE FIRST PLACE? • materialistic things rarely determine long-term happiness • Happiness  determined by natural factors, awareness, and experiences • British philosophers John Locke and Jeremy Bentham claimed happiness is determined by the number of positive events experienced in life2

HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS JUST AN ATTEMPT TO ACHIEVE HAPPINESS • "positive hedonic experience" is what valuing means. • We can't say what's good without saying what it is good for • different individual experiences contain different amounts of happiness = basic dimension or basic component of experience • Experiences that have different amounts of happiness can feel completely different • So if we don’t even know what makes us happy in the first place, how will we know what will makes us happy in the future? 3

HOW WELL CAN THE HUMAN BRAIN PREDICT ITS OWN FUTURE FULFILLMENT? • We are fairly poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future • Modern people take the ability to imagine the future for granted • The part of our brain that allows us to create the future is one of nature's newest inventions • so it isn't surprising that when we try to use this new ability to imagine our futures, we make some errors • The main error = is that we vastly overestimate the hedonic (good or bad) consequences of any event. • we don't seem to learn all that much from our own experience. • To learn from experience requires  that we be able to remember it, and research shows that people are about as bad at remembering their past emotions as they are predicting their future emotions. • That's why we make the same errors again and again 3

GET THE BETTER IN THE FUTURE, LEAVE THE WRONG IN THE PAST • Negative emotions have important roles to play in our lives • because when people think about how terribly wrong things might go and find themselves feeling angry or afraid, they take actions to make sure that things go terribly right instead • Anxiety and fear  keeps us warned • Emotion  range that tells us what to do • Errors are bad - it is better to be able to predict the future than not • knowing what will make us happy increases our ability to reach it • We have brains that can foresee the future in a way that no other animal ever has • Foresight in general allows us to take a glance of the long-term consequences of our actions + to take events to avoid the bad ones and promote the good ones

VARIETY AND TIME • We're all told that variety is the spice of life • Research shows that people do tend to seek more variety than they should • We all think we should try a different doughnut every time we go to the shop, but the fact is that people are measurably happier when they have their favorite on every visit — provided the visits are sufficiently separated in time • If you had to eat 4 donuts in rapid succession  variety would certainly spice up your experience • But if you had to eat 4 donuts on 4 separate Mondays, variety would lower your overall enjoyment • The human brain has great difficulty reasoning about time

PRIMAL INNOCENCE • some people retain the romantic concept that human unhappiness results from the loss of our primal innocence • Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past  but things are easier and better today than at any time in human history • If human kind flourishes  it will be because we embraced learning and reason

SOURCES • (http://www.kaizen-training.com/top-ten-myths-about-the-brain) • http://psychcentral.com/lib/2011/what-makes-us-happy/) • http://edge.org/conversation/the-science-of-happiness

THE MYTH: “we know what will make us happy”