Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Here's an insightful thought-exercise that can be found in the book, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Suppose you lost a dear loved one, perhaps a son or a brother. Answer this: how would you feel about that ten years from now? The responses varied by the person, of course, but as the author pointed out, it can be safely assumed that in imagining how would you feel in ten years, you did not consider what happened during that ten years. for example, you probably did not think about whether you would have another child or whether you won the lottery or gotten into an accident. and certainly one can see how these events during the ten years would have impacted one's feeling by the end of that. This 'blind spot of the mind' is but one example of the many ways that our brain fails us when we are imagining the future.
Here's another exercise. Imagine you are eating a pizza. The odds are that the pizza you conjured up in your imagination is highly specific. That is, it is probably a very specific type of pizza, be it Hawaiian or peperoni pizza with extra cheese. This 'filling-in' is yet another flaw of the ways our mind forecast the future.
These flaws of our mind to imagine accurately or forecast how we would feel in the future gives rise to the title of this book. That while we may strive for happiness, for example, by imagining whether we'll be happy with a new job or a new house or a new family, we may at the end only are able to find happiness by stumbling upon it.
