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Stumbling on Happiness - by Daniel Gilbert | Derek Sivers

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Not at all new-agey, as the title might suggest. Harvard professor of psychology has studied happiness for years, and shares factual findings that will change the way you look at the world. How much of what you do is for now, and how much is to please the future you? We do "good" things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. The human brain is an "anticipation machine" and "making future" is the most important thing it does. Volunteers imagined themselves requesting a date with a person on whom they had a major crush, and those who had had the most elaborate and delicious fantasies a

How much of what you do is for now, and how much is to please the future you? We do "good" things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. The human brain is an "anticipation machine" and "making

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