WOW — a pretty deep, articulate, and funny speech from a Harvard psychologist around how humans become happy and unhappy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/97

My scatter-brained takeaways include:

  • Our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. We think having options and flexibility are good but actually, having options and flexibility generally lead us to more self-doubt and potentially misery. On the other hand, being forced one way tend to give us more support in making peace with our choices.
  • Defend yourself when you have options and too much flexbility by being confident in the choices you make without looking back. He admits that there are “good” and “bad” decisions but my opinion is that this can only be done in hindset. When you make decisions, you probably don’t have all the information at the time so you have to guess. If decisions do feel like they were wrong later on, maybe we should be nicer to ourselves because we don’t have fully visibility into our futures…
  • How can we become more confident in our choices? Since 2M years ago, humans have developed the frontal lobe which allows us to derive what he calls “synthetic happiness” – a way of imagining that something is actually going well when it’s not. Although, he gave numerous seemingly ridiculous examples of people who claimed to be happy [like a guy who was in prison for 30+ years and the guy who turned down the McDonald's franchise], he proved through research that people do have the capability of imagining that they really do like something, when in the past, they didn’t.
  • “Synthetic happiness” is real. My interpretation is that this is synonymous to “brainwashing ourselves” (or telling ourselves that we are happy) and it has material impact on our happiness…
  • Lastly, remember that when our ambition is bounded, we work joyfully. When our ambitions aren’t bounded, we could lie, cheat, be depressed, and sacrifice things that are important. My interpretation of this principle is truly that “ignorance is bliss”, but when situations in life break us out of this ignorance, we pursue ways to bound our ambitions and ideals again.

Cheers!