Thoughts on happiness
I found this talk on ted.com and I’ve been meaning to post something about, so here it is:
In the video at 3:50 he talks about Impact Bias:
“Winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have.”
I think that’s pretty interesting. I think that once you realize this it can help to put things into perspective when you feel really bad about something. And perhaps the “it’s all gonna be alright”-argument isn’t so lame after all.
Another thing he said around 17:25 about the students who can either change or not change their picture:
“People who have no choice and can never change their mind, like it a lot.”
I’m no psychologist so I might be completely wrong here, but I’m wondering if that’s why people are divorcing now more than they used to. Because they know they have a choice and then they’ll start doubting and will become unhappy. Maybe it also works the other way around: if you tell yourself that you had no choice in a certain situation then you’ll be happy with it, whatever it was.
Now I wouldn’t be a computer scientist if I wouldn’t consider the boundaries of this: So, what if you make all your decisions by throwing dice? Whatever the random outcome would be, you’d have to stick with it and you can’t change it. Now would this make you permanently happy about all your decisions?
Probably not, but either way, it’s an interesting talk =)