"If you can’t tell which futures are better than others, it’s hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either." This quote, appearing in a New York Times article by Claudia Dreifus ("A Conversation with Daniel Gilbert," 22 Apr 08), is by Harvard social psychologist and New York Times paperback bestselling author Daniel Gilbert, known as Professor Happiness because he directs a laboratory that studies the nature of human happiness.
Gilbert’s study of happiness followed an intense period of time in his life when his mentor passed away, his mother died, his marriage fell apart and his teenage son developed problems in school. Gilbert discovered that, as bad as his situation was, "it wasn’t devastating,“ which set him to studying how humans predict reactions to future events. "If we can’t predict how we’d react in the future, we can’t set realistic goals for ourselves or figure out how to react to them.“
Dreifus points out that this adaptability has both positive and negative aspects. “The good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.” The reality is that “as a species, we tend to be moderately happy with whatever we get.” This is a most interesting reality check. Our relationship to happiness is a bit more complex than we might think.
The reality is that we don’t need as much happiness as we believe we do. Dreifus goes on to explain, “If you take a scale that goes from zero to 100, people, generally, report their happiness at about 75. We keep trying to get to 100. Sometimes, we get there. But we don’t stay long. We certainly fear the things that would get us down to 20 or 10 – the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a serious challenge to our health. But when those things happen, most of us will return to our emotional baselines more quickly than we’d predict.”
Gilbert explains that most of us harbor “inaccurate, flawed ideas” regarding what happiness is. “Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That’s why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you’ll buy too much, and if your shop after a big meal, you’ll buy too little.” This explains why it is important to continuously verify our dreams, our aspirations, our goals against waking reality.
He continues: “Another factor that makes it difficult to forecast our future happiness is that most of us are rationalizers.” This is not a negative attribute. “People have remarkable talent for finding ways to soften the impact of negative events. Thus they mistakenly expect such blows to be much more devastating than they turn out to be.” The reality is that our expectations and our thoughts shape our experiences, in waking life just as much as in sleep dreams.
In further reality-checking, Gilbert examines what it is that does contribute to happiness. “We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends. We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy - money.”
Gilbert does not deny a degree of importance to having money. "The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you’re rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.“ The key seems to be how the money is spent.
"Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have 'x‘ amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other pople and objects usually aren’t.“ Things get old and decay, but experiences don’t. Spending resources on building connection seems to be our best long-term investment, which is one of the primary goals of Dreamfulness.