We think we know what would make us happy. If only I had… If only this changed… My life would be perfect if… And when tragedy occurs, we imagine ourselves to be permanently devastated. And we predict that life would be better if we had a small problem — such as a bum knee — rather than a big one, such as a heart attack and bypass surgery.

Research into the nature of happiness indicates both to be untrue. We humans try to make “affective predictions” about how we’ll feel about some future event. In reality, we acclimate more quickly to new situations than we realize, which is why we continue our pursuit of more. Our thinking and behavior is shaped by “impact bias,” the errors we make in speculating on the intensity and duration of an event’s impact. Mistakes in expectation can lead to mistakes in choosing, also known as “miswanting.”

We also experience something known as the “empathy gap,” in which we make decisions during the “heat of the moment” that we might not otherwise make if we were “calm, cool, and collected.” The interesting aspect to this is that humans seem unable to consider future consquences when in “hot” states, and that in general, we forget that we adapted to the last acquisition and think that the next choice will fulfill us. Or we forget that we survived the last tragedy in our lives and when another one befalls us, predict we will never recover.

The research into the pursuit of happiness is described more fully in The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. It is fascinating, and the findings have interesting implications regarding how they might apply to psychotherapy, philosophy, social policy development, and marketing.