enthalpy

Saturday, May 27, 2006


I've always had a problem when people us the term 'judgmental in the pejorative sense. Making a judgment is considering options and deciding which one is better. There's nothing wrong with that. It's what separates us from the rest of the animals.

As he puts it, "We don't have to actually have gall bladder surgery or lounge around on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another."

Gilbert has spent 15 years at Harvard's Social Cognition and Emotion laboratory investigating how people imagine what will make them happy, and why they so often get it wrong.

He has found that small pleasures like coming home to a house no worse than the neighbor's is more likely to yield long-term joy than inheriting $1 million, getting a big promotion or being elected president.

"It's the frequency and not the intensity of positive events in your life that leads to happiness, like comfortable shoes or single malt scotch," he says.
Exactly. Happiness is a path, not a destination, and you can't make the right decisions (judgments), you'll never get on it.



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