Stumbling on Happiness

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.

If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others.

What do psychology professors say when they pass each other in the hallway? ‘Hi, you’re fine, how am I?’

There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.

Almost any time we tell anyone anything, we are attempting to change the way their brains operate–attempting to change the way they see the world so that their view of it more closely resembles our own.

As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923. And yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming.

The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes. Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.

(a) value is determined by the comparison of one thing with another; (b) there is more than one kind of comparison we can make in any given instance; and (c) we may value something more highly when we make one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison.

time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other. In fact when episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary–it can actually be costly.

When we have an experience–hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room–on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time.