We Treat Our Future Selves As Though

The Fact That We Often Judge The Pleasure Of An Experience By Its Ending Can Cause Us To Make Some Curious Choices.

Because Your Brain Uses Information From The Areas Around The Blind Spot To Make A Reasonable Guess About What The Blind Spot Would See If Only It Weren't Blind, And Then Your Brain Fills In The Scene With This Information. That's Right, It Invents Things, Creates Things, Makes Stuff Up! It Doesn't Consult You About This, Doesn't Seek Your Approval. It Just Makes Its Best Guess About The Nature Of The Missing Information And Proceeds To Fill In The Scene.

We All Have Direct Experience With Things That Do Or Don't Make Us Happy, We All Have Friends, Therapists, Cabdrivers, And Talk-show Hosts Who Tell Us About Things That Will Or Won't Make Us Happy, And Yet, Despite All This Practice And All This Coaching, Our Search For Happiness Often Culminates In A Stinky Mess. We Expect The Next Car, The Next House, Or The Next Promotion To Make Us Happy Even Though The Last Ones Didn't And Even Though Others Keep Telling Us That The Next Ones Won't.

Psychologists Call This Habituation, Economists Call It Declining Marginal Utility, And The Rest Of Us Call It Marriage.

We Are Happy When We Have Family, We Are Happy When We Have Friends And Almost All The Other Things We Think Make Us Happy Are Actually Just Ways Of Getting More Family And Friends.