TED Talk Tuesdee: Synthetic Happiness

Being out of school and an er... intellectually challenging employment situation, it's not dramatic to say my brain is turning to mush. A few months ago I was digging through my hard drive to find a paper I wrote my final semester of college. When I read it I was super impressed, who is this woman and where is she?!

Blah.

But one small {free} thing I love to do is watch TED talks. They are really fun and engaging and you can learn something totally mind blowing, funny, interesting, fascinating, or confusing in less than a half hour.

Today my friend posted a TED talk on Facebook:

Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness

Being unenamored with happiness as of late, I decided that was reason enough to give it a watch. Also, this friend (although I've only hung out with him for about a week total) is one of the most positive, down-to-earth, and kind guys I know. That was another good reason. 

Go ahead and watch it now.

I am really glad I did. As I began this post I thought of all the posts I have written on the topic of happiness. From documentaries, to cute quotes, to specific ways I try to keep my chin up, I try to figure out how to be happy and stay happy. But these days, who doesn't?

Gilbert really delivers a fascinating talk, beginning with describing the 

Impact Bias: the tendency to overestimate the hedonic impact of future events

In layman's terms we call this "thinking too much and blowing things out of proportion." If you need it broken down even more, just think, "drama queen."

He discusses about how, "We think happiness is a thing to be found." When in fact, we can synthesize happiness from within.

Natural happiness is, "what we get when we get what we wanted."

Whereas synthetic happiness is "what we make when we don't get what we wanted." We as humans see this synthetic happiness as inferior.  I feel like, hey if you can manufacture happiness from within, that is pretty awesome! Additionally, we have evolved to have a prefrontal cortex, a whole section of our brain that can preform this function (as well as other important executive functions). 

He presents a series of fascinating studies and statistics to describe that freedom is a friend of natural happiness, but the enemy of synthetic happiness. This is because, "the psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck. When we are trapped." 

This really floored me. When we are trapped is when we work best? You mean the months I have been trapped in Grenada have been my happiest? Well, when we are stuck, we find a way to be happy with what has happened. We make happiness.

This "psychological immune system," is,
"A system of cognitive processes,  largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them [humans] change their views of the world so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves"

Tell me you don't think that is fascinating! I am definitely not doing this talk justice, I hope you have watched it already, or that you will soon. Maybe I'm still a little data-struck and nerd overloaded.

But I will just end with his closing remarks, 

"When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully, when our ambition is unbounded it leads us to lie to cheat to steal to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown we are reckless and we are cowardly."

I have only about a half a million thoughts and examples of that.

"... our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience."

What commodity is that?

Happiness!