The Futile Pursuit of Happiness Essay - 1053 Words

â€Å"The Futile Pursuit of Happiness† When it comes to predicting how something will make you feel in the future, you will most likely be wrong. In the book Discovering Pop Culture, edited by Anna Romasino, is the article â€Å"The Futile Pursuit of Happiness†. In the article, author Jon Gertner talks about how people think certain things bring them happiness but aren’t as fulfilling as they may think. Gertner gives examples by writing about four men that have been questioning how people predict what will make them happy and how they feel after it happens. Among these men are a psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, psychologist Tim Wilson, economist George Loewenstein, and psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Gertner uses facts from scores of†¦show more content†¦The article moves on to the term adaptation. Happiness is what motivates people to do things. â€Å"Our brains are not tying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us† (37). People are unable to realize that they are adapti ng so they don’t connect that with their decisions. People will adapt, but the point is that they dont realize that they will adapt. This goes back to people being unable to predict what will make them happy because they don’t realize that they can adapt to anything. People can also adapt to negative events no matter how much they think they can’t. Gertner writes about an interview he had with Gilbert about the death of a friend. Gilbert says that he can relate to everyone else by thinking that he will never get over it and it will never get better. Even though he has feels this way, he remembers his research and how he will learn to adapt. Loewensteins research is about how people cannot predict how they will behave in certain situations. He explains that people act in a hot state when they are anxious, brave or scared. On the other hand, people act in a cold state where they are calm and rational. â€Å"This empathy gap in thought and behavior--we ca nnot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state--affects happiness† (39). The experiment that Loewenstein did was to find out how many people would dance in front ofShow MoreRelated Response to The Futile Pursuit of Happiness, by Jon Gertner Essay865 Words   |  4 Pages The Futile Pursuit of Happiness by Jon Gertner was published in September of 2003. It is an essay that discusses the difference between how happy we believe we will be with a particular outcome or decision, and how happy we actually are with the outcome. The essay is based on experiments done by two professors: Daniel Gilbert and George Loewenstein. The experiments show that humans are never as happy as we think we will be with an outcome because affective forecasting and miswanting causeRead More Can Happiness Be Achieved? 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