Daniel Gilbert

I think urgency is truly.

There's a psychologist named Killingsworth alongside of Daniel Gilbert, whose work I reference a lot.

But they studied people's kind of everyday experiences and found that our minds obviously wander quite a bit.

And they found that people tend to be less happy when their minds were somewhere other than what they were doing.

You're not just letting go of a possibility, you're letting go of a future you've already spent years emotionally investing in.

Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson have spent decades studying something called affective forecasting, which is simply our ability to predict how future events will make us feel.

The surprising discovery is that human beings are remarkably bad at it.

We consistently overestimate how happy positive events will make us.

Yeah, you've really nailed something there.

There's a great happiness researcher which I love called Daniel Gilbert who wrote a book called Stumbling Upon Happiness.

And in it, he says that every goal that we pursue is in the pursuit of happiness.

Be it, you know, I'm going to get a promotion.

But anyway, one of the most turbulent years in living memory, the most surprising Google search word was happiness.

So what does that tell us about our culture's relationship with happiness, but also seen through the lens of pleasure and purpose? You know, I think that's an interesting point.

I think it comes back to this notion that I mentioned before from Daniel Gilbert that everything we pursue in life is for the sake of happiness.

Yeah.

The secret of happiness is variety, but the secret of variety, like the secret of all spices, is knowing when to use it.

Daniel Gilbert We all know that distraction is bad, and that we need to avoid the dreaded multitasking.

But what if there was such a thing as intentional distraction? If you're exercising, you know what it's like to completely fatigue a muscle.

You work and work and eventually you exhaust that muscle and can get nothing more out of it.

So I was a little hesitant.

But then a few things happened that made me open to it, including, I very vividly remember watching my friend Dan Gilbert, who's a professor at Harvard, longtime friend of mine, mentor of mine.

Author of

Stumbling on Happiness.

I mean, I knew for myself, I'll just speak for my own mind, for myself, I know as a psychologist, we can't anticipate very well how we're going to feel in situations we haven't been in.

And a better way to figure out what we're going to feel like in a situation we're not in is to talk to people who are in that situation.

Dan Gilbert, who I had mentioned earlier, my friend and Harvard psych professor who wrote Stumbling on Happiness, refers to this as surrogation, talking to people who are in a situation or learning from people who are in a situation how they feel and using that as a guide to how you will feel.

And so we decided to do some surrogation.

There's a concept in psychology called affective forecasting.

Researchers Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have studied how we predict our emotional reactions to things that haven't happened yet.

And what they found is that we're actually kind of shit at it.

We tend to overestimate how intensely and for how long we're going to feel the emotions we associate with future events.

So Matthew Killingsworth,

and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard published a paper in Science in 2010 with a title that itself is almost a complete summary of their findings.

It says, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

But the method is as important as the finding because the method is what made the finding possible.

But in psychology, there is a concept called the end of history illusion.

Oh, formulated by Daniel Gilbert, right?

Yes, Daniel Gilbert.

The illusion is our cognitive tendency to recognize that we have changed significantly in the past while simultaneously believing that our current self is the finished product.

So we know we used to be different, but we think we're done changing now.