Happiness is not sought; we ran into him. It’s simple. Daniel Gilbert makes it very clear in his bestseller “Trebuoing on Happiness”, in which he presents very pleasantly different conclusions, theories and realities about happiness.
This book is an exciting journey on how the mind works and how it plays with us. The spectrum it covers is broad, from optical illusions to the influence on our mood of the opinions of others that have been found in similar situations.
- In addition.
- It tells us that there is no simple formula for finding happiness.
- However.
- Our brain allows us to move forward into the future and thus help us understand what makes us stumble.
- We invite you to think a little more about the subject in the next few lines!.
Sometimes we forget that happiness is subjective. Especially when we read what they want to sell us as if that feeling were a material good. Happiness is an experience and, as such, is different in each person and marked by their situation.
When we imagine the situations we can experience in the future, we can realize that there are clearly two types of future. The immediate future, the one that will happen tomorrow or in a few days, which we find most believable and close. And another much farther future, located light years away from what we live in now, a vague future and difficult to feel like something real today.
Many times we are so ingrained in the present that we imagine our future always centered on the present in which we live, for example, it is very difficult to imagine the taste of a fruit that we will eat tomorrow, if at the moment we try. imagine, we have occupied the sense of taste with another flavor.
This is called presentism and condemns our vision of things, even of what is possible because it is anchored in the present in a certain way. It’s not about thinking about the future all the time, it’s about knowing that when we imagine it, we give it. the possibilities of our present.
So when we think about happiness, we think it has to do with what we’re dreaming about now, but different experiences have shown us otherwise, happiness can be what we achieve when we don’t achieve what we dream of now. that happiness can be hidden in what you don’t even contemplate right now and what, fortunately, you can stumble upon.
Human beings do not tolerate uncertainty. In fact, you might think that uncertainty opens up a world of infinite possibilities, and that’s good, but unfortunately human beings focus more on the sense of lack of power and the importance of control than on the good that can happen. .
In addition, in the face of uncertainty, the human being seeks to explain the events that occur around them, especially if these events are inexplicable and amplifies their emotional reach because they are rare and we tend to keep thinking about them.
For these and other reasons, Daniel Gilbert told us that we tend to stumble upon happiness, even if it is not possible to see it, because our brain traps it, he does so by comparing our happiness with that of others, even if he knows that he is subjective and that we, in the same circumstances, may not feel like those we believe to be happy.
Think about it: what if happiness were the ability to accept that everything can change, what if happiness is what we can’t control, what if happiness moved into the future and understood what our brains were stumbling upon before we reached it?