The Futile Pursuit Of Happiness

786 Words4 Pages
Khoi Hoang
Instructor: Mr. Julian Knox
EH 102 - section 121
Writing Assignment #1 - 02/03/2012
The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
In the article, “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness”, first printed in The New York Times Magazine (2003), Jon Gertner argues that our future emotions are not the same as we expect, and people mostly falsely predict their future happiness. He says, “That is because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong” (444). He gives some points of his view about how people could be influenced by these forecasting errors.
By using lots of resources from the studies of happiness made by Daniel Gilbert – a professor in psychology department from Harvard University, Gertner says that our decisions in many events depend on how we estimate the emotional results coming from these events. However, we normally amplify the outcomes of our future events. Finally, we are wrong about everything that we predict. Using the term “impact bias”, defined as the difference between what we are looking for the feeling and what we virtually meet that feeling, Gertner explains, “You may have high hopes, but the impact bias suggests that it will almost certainly be less cool, and in a shorter time, than you imagine” (445). He comments that people need to overcome the obstacles between them and happiness to get what they want. People usually tend to get errors as they predict how bad when they missed opportunities in their life. Our emotions biologically protect us from bad things. When we make a mistake, this mistake is illustrated as a disaster by our emotions to remind us not to get it again.
Next, Gertner writes that whether good or bad things come to us, we ultimately adapt to them as a part of normal events happen throughout a human life. Adaptation is a heritage of human development. In the other words, we are

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