<photo: windmills going round and round endlessly in the Gobi Desert>
would winning the million dollar Toto first prize make you the happiest person forever?
Daniel Gilbert, a professor in Harvard's department of psychology thinks that the answer is no. in his study of lottery winners, Prof Gilbert found that the happiness effect didn't last. that's because when it comes to predicting how happy you will be, you are most likely wrong. this is due to a behavior called "affective forecasting" - our inability to correctly predict our own emotions.
when we get rich due to lotteries or career promotions, our expectations and desires rise in tandem. this results in no permanent gain in happiness as we end up where we started. this related behavior is called the "hedonic treadmill".
if affective forecasting and the hedonic treadmill makes the pursuit of happiness close to impossible, how then can we ever be happy? #bcc
“We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.” Daniel M. Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness