Stumbling on Happiness

Our belif in the variability of others and in the uniqueness of the self is especially powerful when it comes to emotion. Because we can feel our own emotions but must infer the emotions of others by watching their faces and listening to their voices, we often have the impression that others don't experience the same intensity of emotion that we do, which is why we expect others to recognize our feelings even when we can't recognize theirs.

This sense of emotional uniqueness starts early.

Our mythical belif in the variability and uniqueness of induviduals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates. After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe that people's emotional reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than it actually is.

The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one's future emotions, but because we don't realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.

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Like the hogwash that farmers feed their pigs, the hogwash that our friends and teachers and parents feed us is meant to make us happy; but unlike hogwash of the porcine variety, human hogwash does not always achieve its end.

Ideas can flourish if they preserve the social systems that allow them to be transmitted. These ideas must disguise themselves as prescriptions for indivudual happiness.

Rather than calculating utilities with mathematical precision, we simply step into tomorrow's shoes and see how well they fit. Our ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen enables us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without taking them.

Foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go ther,e or do that. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.

For millions of years, human beings have conquered their ignorance by dividing the labor of discovery and then communicating their discoveries to one another, which is why the average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the univers than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name.

Communication is a kind of "vicarious observation" that allows us to learn about the world without ever leaving the comfort of our Barcaloungers.

Why continue to make bad decisions?

1. A lot of the advice we receive from others is bad advice that we foolishly accept.

2. A lot of the advice we receive from others is good advice that we foolishly reject.

Super-replicators: Genes tend to be transmitted when they make us do thing that transmits their genes. Even bad genes can become super-replicators if they compensate for these costs by promoting their own means of transmission. The same logic can explain the transmission of beliefs. If a particular belief has some property that facilitates its own transmission, then that belief tends to be held by an increasing number of minds.

The production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth. Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.

We are nodes in a social network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated.

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If you believe that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel.

Remembering and experience feels a lot like opening a drawer and retrieving a story that was filed away on the day it was written, but as we've seen in previous chapters, that feeling is one of our brain's most sophisticated illusions. Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it. The clip-and-save method usually works pretty well because the editor usually has a keen sense of which elements are essential and which are disposable. That's why we remember how the groom looked when he kissed the bride but not which finger the flower girl had up her nose when it happened.

Memory does have a few quirks that cause it to misrepresent the past and hence causes us to misimage the future.

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We show a pronounced tendency to recall the items at the end of the series far better than the items at the beginning or in the middle. When we look back on the entire series, our impression is strongly influenced by its final items.

We remember feeling as we believe we must have felt. The problem with this error of retrospection is that it can keep us from idscovering our errors of prospection.

Apparently, prospections and retrospections can be in perfect agreement despite the fact that neigher accurately describes our actual experience. Our inability to recall how we really felt is one of the reasons why our wealth of experience so often turns out to be a poverty of riches.

Our memeory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moments, and theories about how we must have felt way back then, all of which gravely compromise our ability to learn from our own experience.

Because we do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do not realie that we will do so again in the future. Not only does our naivete cause us to overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity, but it also leads us to take actions that may undermine the conspiracy.

We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an anction than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can.

Yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and comitment over freedom.

We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically. These tendencies make it easy for us to explain unpleasant experiences in ways that exonerate us and make us feel better. The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.

Foresight is just a fallible as eyesight and hindsight. Fallible eyesight can be remedied by glasses and fallible hindsight can be remedied by written records of the past - but what of fallible foresight?