Stumbling on Happiness

Seeing the Great Pyramid or remembering the Golden Gate or imagining the Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building any one of them.

Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.

Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.29 Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimisti... See more

We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so enables us to shop among the many fates that might befall us and select the best one.

Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy.

Christian theologians added a nifty twist to this classical conception: Happiness was not merely the product of a life of virtue but the reward for a life of virtue, and that reward was not necessarily to be expected in this lifetime.

As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an “anticipation machine,” and “making future” is the most important thing it does.