The First Day of the Rest of My Life

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.....or something like that. My job officially ended yesterday, making today, well, awesome. I slept in, had a long lunch with a friend, ran a few errands, got my 100 minutes done while it was still mostly daylight out and am about halfway done with my reading for the day. This challenge ain't so bad when I don't have a day job!

I finished reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert a couple days ago, it was an interesting book about how we think we know what will make us happy, but really, we have no idea. Wasn't that the opening line the The Real World or something? Anyways, at times Gilbert's arguments ramble on like Wallace Shawn's character in The Princess Bride. (You know, the "inconceivable" guy who talks himself around in a circle and then drinks the poisoned wine? Sorry if I just ruined the movie for all three of you who have never seen it.) Aside from his rambling, Gilbert raises some interesting questions. Here are a few passages that made me think twice, and re-read it a few times, and no, not just because there are big words.

"Imagining 'What it would feel like if' sounds like a fluffy bit of daydreaming, but in fact, it is one of the most consequential mental acts we can perform, and we perform it every day. We make decisions about whom to marry, where to work, when to reproduce, where to retire, and we base these decisions in large measure on our beliefs about how it would feel if this event happened but that one didn't. Our lives may not always turn out as we wish or as we plan, but we are confident that if they had, then our happiness would have been unbounded and our sorrows thin and fleeting. Perhaps it is true that we can't always get what we want, but at least we feel sure that we know what to want in the first place."

"[When putting ourselves in other people's shoes] we are forced to consider the possibility that what clearly seems to be the better life may actually be the worse life and that when we look down the time line at the different lives we might lead we may not always know which is which."

"...when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind's eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh."

Gilbert argues that cannot know what will make us happy in the future because we do not take all situations and possible events into account when we imagine our future "happiness" because it is impossible. We cannot predict a full picture because, well, we aren't psychics, or at least most of us are not. We may think that if we make X salary or marry this person or live in that community, then we will finally be totally, 100% happy. But we don't think about the fact that in order to make X salary, we will have to sacrifice all our free time or if we marry this person, our families will never speak to us again or if we live in that community we will never see our friends because it is too far out of town. His book is not about solutions to this "problem." It is merely an interesting discussion about the fact that we think we know, but we actually have no idea. I guess this means we should focus on what we do know and what we do have, which is the present, right here, right now.