Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert

The best way to estimate future happiness is to ask someone who just had the experience (surrogate).

Realism: imagination’s tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us. Features we fail to consider are often quite important

Presentism: imagination’s tendency to project the present onto the future.

Rationalization: imagination’s failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen due to our psychological immune system kicking in (impact bias).

We tend to see ourselves as unique because only we can experience our own thoughts.

We enjoy thinking of ourselves as special.

We tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually are.