“We all have direct experience with things that do or don’t make us happy. We all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won’t make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. …We can be wrong about all sorts of things – the price of soybeans, the life span of dust mites, and the history of flannel – but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience? Can we believe we are feeling something we aren’t? Are there really folks out there who can’t accurately answer the world’s most familiar question? Yes, and you’ll find one in the mirror.”

-Daniel Gilbert (2006, p. 196/55)

In his book ‘Stumbling on Happiness,’ psychologist Daniel Gilbert methodically illustrates a rather hard to believe but difficult to argue with theory: While we all have wishes and desires, hopes and dreams for the future, none of us ever truly knows with any accuracy exactly what will make us happy. In fact, we’re often dead wrong in our pursuit for happiness, chasing after shallow things that fail to satisfy while being surprised when we often find solace and comfort where we thought we wouldn’t. We’ve all experienced happiness, and we all think we know just where and how to find it, yet the maps we formulate to try and get there are often a tattered mess, drawing us off course and not leading anywhere towards the principles we hope to find.

But why, exactly, is this? Why is something we think we know so well so elusive to us?

The human brain is basically an “anticipation machine,” constantly trying to formulate and imagine future scenarios so that it can predict and control them. (Dennett, 1996) People spend a great deal of time thinking about the future: imagining future events, living out their hopes and dreams in fantasy, detailing what will need to happen in order for their lives to go perfectly. The problem is that our thoughts about the future are just as warped by the factors discussed throughout this publication as are our thoughts in the present. When people make predictions about what their reactions would be to future events, they forget that their brains have forged numerous assumptions on things they could never know in order to reach such a conclusion in the first place. (Dunning et al., 1990; Vallone et al., 1990) This leads to expectations, desires, and goals that are often based more in imagination than reality. As Mr. Gilbert puts it, “Our lives may not always turn out as we wish or as we plan, but we are confident that if they had, then our happiness would have been unbounded and our sorrows thin and fleeting. Perhaps it is true that we can’t always get what we want, but at least we feel sure that we know what to want in the first place. …We know these things because we can look forward in time and simulate worlds that do not yet exist.” (2006, p.76-77)

Our imaginations about the future suffer from numerous shortcomings that distort our barometer on happiness:

A) The tendency to project the present onto the future
When we peer into the future, we do so from the perspective of today. We find it difficult to imagine that we will ever think differently, feel differently, or desire differently than we do at the moment. Yet times change, and with every new day, every new experience, so do our perspectives. So when we imagine future situations that haven’t come to pass, we’re merely guessing at how we might feel, because the mere aspect of having that event occur will alter our feelings and perspectives. We may feel certain we’d be happy in a 30,000 square foot mansion. But if we actually got one, the experience itself might change our perspective. We might discover it to be lonely, hard to keep, and too long to walk. We might find it to be not nearly as self-fulfilling as we thought it would be. We might find that we were just as happy in the 3 bedroom house with the little yard surrounded by neighbors and a park down the street. “Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will,” says Gilbert (2006, p. 137),

B) We fail to recognize that things will seem much different once they happen
After we move into that mansion, will it still hold the same appeal as it did when we were chasing after it? If you lost your job, might you chance upon a more fulfilling career? Might you recognize how much you hated that job to begin with? How will you adjust? What new doors will open when one closes? Will what you find meaningful change at some point along the way?

C) The action over inaction bias
We tend to think we’ll feel more upset over actions (such as a bad thing happening) than over inactions (I should have taken that trip to Africa; I wish I had been more adventurous in life, etc.). Yet in reality, when it’s all said and done with, people tend to be more regretful about things they haven’t experienced than the negative things they have experienced. (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Gilbert, 2006)

D) We fail to account for adjustments
Research shows that people who have experienced a debilitating injury, such as a spinal cord injury that leaves them partially paralyzed or an accident that leads to the amputation of a limb, rate themselves much higher in terms of happiness than we expect them to feel when we ourselves imagine such a scenario. (Gilbert, 2006) One big reason is that we fail to account for adjustments made after the fact. Their life is not the same, it is certainly different, but different doesn’t necessarily mean as horrible as we think. We adjust, we learn how to do things again, we find new forms of meaning and happiness, and in the end, can be just as content as we were before.

How horrible you may feel in the short term (or when thinking about a bad event) is not an accurate indicator of how you’ll feel in the future once you actually experience a setback and have had time to adjust to the situation. Our brains tend to stay stuck on our initial thoughts, and we fail to see that things may be a whole lot better than we imagine them at first.

E) Source misattribution
Source misattribution refers to peoples’ innate tendency to blame a false source for their suffering, while missing the real root cause of their heartache. If you remember back to the flash suppression tests discussed earlier in this book, even though volunteers aren’t able to consciously perceive the word or image they are viewing, this doesn’t stop them from creating explanations for their behavior. Since they have no cognizance of what they perceived, they erroneously attribute such moods and behavior to incorrect sources. (“I’m a little tired today, etc.”; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) In other words, we can be thrust into emotional states without truly knowing what triggered them, all the while blaming something else.

The most prominent form of source misattribution comes through all of the social persuasion and suggestive influence that exists all around us. Social and environmental cues are influencing your emotions on an everyday basis. For example, I once knew someone who had experienced incest in her family as a child. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience, but it wasn’t a horrible one either. It stopped on its own accord and as an adult she had a good and normal relationship with the perpetrator. Yet every time she watched Law & Order episodes, she would be depressed for days and struggle to come to grips with her colorful past. Naturally, she blamed this on her earlier experiences. It never occurred to her that it wasn’t these past experiences that were the problem, but the cues and suggestions about how to interpret such experiences that were driving her depressive state. Sure enough, when the suggestive influence that came with watching the show was stopped, so were her negative thoughts.

As obvious as this may seem, no one had ever told her that she could choose to take a different perspective on things than what was advocated on TV, or that the dramatized, sensationalized, and overly negative views doled out by such shows aren’t an accurate representation of reality, and certainly not of her specific situation. I helped her towards the right information (the research on the topic, which is to say the least, far more mixed and far less condemning than drama shows), and eventually, she was able to watch such stuff and not become upset, because she knew where the negativity was coming from and that it wasn’t accurate. It would still briefly evoke such emotions, as any type of social stress will do regardless of its validity, but she could refute it afterwards just as she might tell herself that the death stars on Star Wars aren’t real.

She’s not alone. Whether it be alcoholic or drug abusive parents, verbal abuse, divorce, or any other situation personal to us, we all encounter suggestive persuasion in numerous forms throughout our everyday lives. Its influence most often goes by undetected, molding our psychology in ways unseen, often as we erroneously attribute our mental states to the wrong source. (Past experiences as opposed to the interpretation of those experiences; our own sources of happiness versus what society at large tells us should make us happy.) For those who have similar experiences in their past, drama shows such as Law & Order are probably the greatest mass depressant society has ever seen. Because so much of our psychology is tied up in unseen suggestive influences that aren’t our own, we often…

• Attribute our suffering to the wrong sources, and thus, are also wrong about what might bring us happiness.

• Chase after things that others suggest should make us happy, but in fact, don’t.

• Resist things that do make us happy, or suffer needlessly from otherwise benign events, because we’re wrapped up in interpretations of life that aren’t our own and are not consistent with our experiences.

This material is an excerpt from the eBook The Resilient Mind. Get the full book packed with tons of other helpful psychology information for just $7.99. All proceeds from your purchase go to help kids in need!