'when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong.'

Very very very interesting research on the 'impact bias' and how much time we take to make decisions to achieve happiness.


'Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ''impact bias'' -- ''impact'' meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ''bias'' our tendency to err. The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. Would a 20 percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost surely it won't turn out that way. And a new plasma television? 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. Worse, Gilbert has noted that these mistakes of expectation can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure. He calls this ''miswanting.''...

''You know, the Stones said, 'You can't always get what you want,' '' Gilbert adds. ''I don't think that's the problem. The problem is you can't always know what you want.''...

Gilbert's papers on affective forecasting began to appear in the late 1990's, but the idea to study happiness and emotional prediction actually came to him on a sunny afternoon in October 1992, just as he and his friend Jonathan Jay Koehler sat down for lunch outside the psychology building at the University of Texas at Austin, where both men were teaching at the time. Gilbert was uninspired about his studies and says he felt despair about his failing marriage. And as he launched into a discussion of his personal life, he swerved to ask why economists focus on the financial aspects of decision making rather than the emotional ones. Koehler recalls, ''Gilbert said something like: 'It all seems so small. It isn't really about money; it's about happiness. Isn't that what everybody wants to know when we make a decision?' '' For a moment, Gilbert forgot his troubles, and two more questions came to him. Do we even know what makes us happy? And if it's difficult to figure out what makes us happy in the moment, how can we predict what will make us happy in the future?...

''People ask why I study happiness,'' Gilbert says, ''and I say, 'Why study anything else?' It's the holy grail. We're studying the thing that all human action is directed toward.''
One experiment of Gilbert's had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

All of these studies establish the links between prediction, decision making and well-being. The photography experiment challenges our common assumption that we would be happier with the option to change our minds when in fact we're happier with closure. The transit experiment demonstrates that we tend to err in estimating our regret over missed opportunities. The ''things not so bad'' work shows our failure to imagine how grievously irritations compromise our satisfaction. Our emotional defenses snap into action when it comes to a divorce or a disease but not for lesser problems. We fix the leaky roof on our house, but over the long haul, the broken screen door we never mend adds up to more frustration.

''Our research simply says that whether it's the thing that matters or the thing that doesn't, both of them matter less than you think they will,'' he says. ''Things that happen to you or that you buy or own -- as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you're wrong by a certain amount. You're overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that's true of positive and negative events.''

Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950's to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.'' In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ''We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.''

As Gilbert points out, this glitch is also significant when it comes to negative events like losing a job or the death of someone we love, in response to which we project a permanently inconsolable future. ''The thing I'm most interested in, that I've spent the most time studying, is our failure to recognize how powerful psychological defenses are once they're activated,'' Gilbert says. ''We've used the metaphor of the 'psychological immune system' -- it's just a metaphor, but not a bad one for that system of defenses that helps you feel better when bad things happen. Observers of the human condition since Aristotle have known that people have these defenses. Freud spent his life, and his daughter Anna spent her life, worrying about these defenses. What's surprising is that people don't seem to recognize that they have these defenses, and that these defenses will be triggered by negative events.'' During the course of my interviews with Gilbert, a close friend of his died. ''I am like everyone in thinking, I'll never get over this and life will never be good again,'' he wrote to me in an e-mail message as he planned a trip to Texas for the funeral. ''But because of my work, there is always a voice in the back of my head -- a voice that wears a lab coat and has a lot of data tucked under its arm -- that says, 'Yes, you will, and yes, it will.' And I know that voice is right.''

Either way, predicting how things will feel to us over the long term is mystifying.

Would a world without forecasting errors be a better world? Would a life lived without forecasting errors be a richer life? Among the academics who study affective forecasting, there seems little doubt that these sorts of questions will ultimately jump from the academy to the real world. ''If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure,'' Daniel Kahneman says, ''then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.''

To Loewenstein, who is especially attendant to the friction between his emotional and deliberative processes, a life without forecasting errors would most likely be a better, happier life. ''If you had a deep understanding of the impact bias and you acted on it, which is not always that easy to do, you would tend to invest your resources in the things that would make you happy,'' he says. This might mean taking more time with friends instead of more time for making money. He also adds that a better understanding of the empathy gap -- those hot and cold states we all find ourselves in on frequent occasions -- could save people from making regrettable decisions in moments of courage or craving.

Gilbert seems optimistic about using the work in terms of improving ''institutional judgment'' -- how we spend health care dollars, for example -- but less sanguine about using it to improve our personal judgment. He admits that he has taken some of his research to heart; for instance, his work on what he calls the psychological immune system has led him to believe that he would be able to adapt to even the worst turn of events. In addition, he says that he now takes more chances in life, a fact corroborated in at least one aspect by his research partner Tim Wilson, who says that driving with Gilbert in Boston is a terrifying, white-knuckle experience. ''But I should have learned many more lessons from my research than I actually have,'' Gilbert admits. ''I'm getting married in the spring because this woman is going to make me happy forever, and I know it.'' At this, Gilbert laughs, a sudden, booming laugh that fills his Cambridge office. He seems to find it funny not because it's untrue, but because nothing could be more true. This is how he feels. ''I don't think I want to give up all these motivations,'' he says, ''that belief that there's the good and there's the bad and that this is a contest to try to get one and avoid the other. I don't think I want to learn too much from my research in that sense.''

This is exciting to Gilbert. But at the same time, it's not a technique he wants to shape into a self-help book, or one that he even imagines could be practically implemented. ''Hope and fear are enduring features of the human experience,'' he says, ''and it is unlikely that people are going to abandon them anytime soon just because some psychologist told them they should.'' In fact, in his recent writings, he has wondered whether forecasting errors might somehow serve a larger functional purpose he doesn't yet understand. If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ''The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,'' he says. ''When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn't sweat as much because you'd say: 'You know, I'll be happy in both. I'll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there's no use in killing myself for the next week.' But maybe our caricatures of the future -- these overinflated assessments of how good or bad things will be -- maybe it's these illusory assessments that keep us moving in one direction over the other. Maybe we don't want a society of people who shrug and say, 'It won't really make a difference.'

''Maybe it's important for there to be carrots and sticks in the world, even if they are illusions,'' he adds. ''They keep us moving towards carrots and away from sticks.'''

Daily Mail - Stephen Elliot

'Have you ever heard a tree fall in the forest? When you make something and no one responds it’s the silence that mimics the scream. In a perfect world you can separate the art from the audience. In a certain relationship you have an audience of one and that’s more than enough. But in truth...

Well, it’s true when I say I write to find out how I feel about things. I write to explore. I create from play, or to untangle a series of knots that have formed a rope that is choking me to death. In other words, it’s possible to know and not know something at the same time. To know someone loves you and to not believe they love you. And it’s also true that art needs audience the way the ocean needs waves.'

"let your skin down around your ankles like a banana's peel"

'Last night I was in the car with Z. following the shoot and we were talking about love. I said, You can't be picky about your definition of love. She said she got bored after three times and I said that wasn't an uncommon malady. I said, Until a person gets over their thing you will not be an exception to that thing. I said, Falling out of love is a defense mechanism. I said, The problem is you're the red flag...
 

...you have to be doing something creative that is not about money at all, even if it happens to make you money later. Otherwise you'll always be angry.

It's just that when you're not doing something for free you're in trouble. Not to be confused with doing everything for free, which is when you're also in trouble. I never did internships but I did bartend for a long time, and wait tables, and answered the phones for Kaplan test prep services when I wasn't teaching their tests. And I've never been paid by the vast majority of publications I've written for. And I was a furniture mover for a year or two. You get what I mean. Though I've also never been a hard worker. My laziness is as wide and deep as the Silver Lake Reservoir. In other words, I don't know anything about my laziness, it's unmapped terrain, for me. I was a poet mostly, and then a short story writer, and eventually a novelist, but it never occurred to me that someone should be paying me to do these things. I thought that everybody should have a job, or a hustle, at least while they were writing their first book.

I basically make a living writing the things I want to write (though, I keep my expenses low, I don't make enough to have a child, unless the child came with a wife and that wife had a good, stable income). I'm running out of time. I'm dying, though not necessarily faster than anyone else. I don't want to tell people to wait, to have patience, their time will come. Though, that is the way I feel about some people.

But how about this? It's true that if you keep writing you'll write something good. If that's not enough for you I'll tell you a secret, it's not enough for me either. I don't know what is enough. Money will absolutely not do it (though my father used to say "money can't buy happiness, but it can sure make misery easier to take," and when I worked in the red light district in Amsterdam the boss, who carried a machine gun in his briefcase, used to say, "Money's headache" and all the salesmen would say, "I like headache").

Sometimes I get jealous, other times jealousy seems like the strangest thing in the world. Someone sent me an email about Lena Dunham getting a big advance on a book of essays. I don't understand why I'm supposed to be upset about that. I like Lena Dunham. I don't know her, but Girls is a good show. I'm not mad at her for being born into what seems like a good situation. She's not like the Romney Rich, the rich people who were born rich telling you if you worked harder you would have what they have. People that went to fancy schools and didn't have to take out loans telling you they worked for everything they have. Not every rich person lacks perspective. I don't hate rich people indiscriminately, though I suppose it is a small mark against them. If I was rich, I think, I would vote for politicians who wanted to raise taxes on me, but I wouldn't pay taxes if I didn't have to…

I do think, if you're getting by now, money will not make you feel better about yourself. It will, however, relieve a lot of stress. There was a study, in the New York Times a few years ago, an essay in the magazine that was then published in Best American Non-Required Reading, quantifying happiness. I'll summarize that the research showed there was a big jump in happiness between poverty and middle class (there is no "upper-middle class", upper middle class is a term used by rich people who are embarrassed by their wealth). There was virtually no relation between money and happiness after that initial jump. Once you weren't worried about food and rent that was about as good as it got, emotionally…

 

One thing that is always true, if you let it be, is that writing a book, or making a movie, or being a writer, is a series of small humiliations. It's basically in how you take things. There will always be a club you can't get into. You never get to stop paying your dues. Even when you get in the club, the door changes, the new person guarding the rope doesn't recognize you. The new person is an editor at a magazine you've written at for years. That's part of why I love actors. It's such a pure art form, to put oneself out there for ridicule, to be made fun of, to be shredded as if mauled by a tiger. The endless auditions where you are asked to cry, or take your shirt off, in front of strangers. And then they don't call you back. Sometimes they say they'll call you back, but they still don't. Emotionally, acting has to be the most difficult thing. To maintain ego in the face of constant rejection. Acting is a metaphor for life multiplied. Acting is filled with rejection, at every level. But you have to always go all the way, otherwise there's no point, and you won't do well if you don't. That's true of all of the arts, depending on your definition of art. And then you have to feel safe, and raw, let your skin down around your ankles like a banana's peel, stand naked and bleeding, and then go again.'

 

Thank you Stephen Elliot.

 

I like the part when he says 'you have to go all the way, otherwise there's no point.' It reminds me of a time when I saw a comedian live and he forced members of the audience to join his act. Their impressions were timid interpretations of his instruction. They looked silly thrusting their stuff against strangers where as the comedian in full pelt did not.

 

I think of times myself when I didn't go all the way. There have been so many times when I've held back and most of them have been to protect my feelings. There's something I want to do and have done for a long time, typically I've held back in fear that revealing too much may lead to a position I had not desired. I'm in constant self negotiation over who will suffer the most. Since this has been going on for some time I am left in self doubt - I've suffered the most over all.

 

I want the tone of 'That cake had consequence' to change for some time. I'm gonna have to be bold.