delight, a photo by mayeesherr. (in Sri Lanka!) on Flickr.
Dan Gilbert, author of
"Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if
we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us
feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.
Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_gilbert.html
