Having recently read Daniel Gilbert’s excellent Stumbling Upon Happiness, I was pleased to find an article penned by him relaunching the New York Times’ Happy Days blog.

It was in ‘Stumbling Upon Happiness’ that I first read about the ‘change blindness’ experiments that I covered in my most recent post. In the book, Gilbert convincingly shows how our overestimation of our brain’s ability to effectively collect, process and evaluate data leads us to act in highly irrational and inconsistent ways in the pursuit of our own happiness. In particular, he demonstrates how bad we are at predicting how we will feel in the future. We consistently overestimate the happiness that riches and good fortune will bring us, as well as the unhappiness wrought by misfortune. Not only that, but our brains also seem to lack the ability to ever learn from such mistakes. You are probably be saying to yourself that this is no great revelation, but at the same time I would predict that you are as helpless as I am to convert your knowledge into a strategy to overcome the problem.

As an example of the paradoxes involved in predicting our own future happiness, Gilbert cites the example of a bride about to get married. If you asked her how she would feel if she was jilted at the altar, you would expect her to say that it would be her worst nightmare. And yet you could equally predict that if you asked a selection of brides who had been faced this nightmare a couple of years ago that a good number would say that it was the best thing that had ever happened to them.  They would likely report that they had narrowly escaped a marriage that was clearly wrong for them, and had since moved on to create a new life for themselves, perhaps finding a new partner who, in retrospect, is a much better choice. The bride-to-be, however, is highly unlikely to take such a long-term view into account when considering the effects of being left at the altar. It turns out that such ‘future blindness’ afflicts all of us on a pretty much constant basis.

Daniel Gilbert’s post in the New York Times shows how, in a similar fashion, uncertainty leaves us with a disproportionate degree of unhappiness compared to those who have no doubt of their fate:

Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.

That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur.

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Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.

Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

As my wife and I search for our first permanent work since arriving in Canada last October, we may occasionally be laid low for a couple of days by bad news of rejection following a promising interview, or from a temporary position not developing into something longer term but, by and large, I can imagine that our states of mind are healthier than many of those in fear of losing their jobs at the moment. Our optimism bounces back as soon as our focus returns to the possibilities in front of us. Applying for jobs is a process that spurs the imagination to what we could do if successful (getting our belongings out of storage and getting a place of our own, just for starters), and the mere process of writing nice things about oneself in résumés and cover letters seems to inject positivity.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how we would feel if we were both working for GM or Chrysler at the moment with the threat of unemployment hanging over both of our heads. We would likely be scared to death about ending up in the situation we are currently living in. It would be great if  had the mental wherewithal to learn something from this observation in order to avoid stresses in the future when I have more to lose. As Daniel Gilbert suggests, however, this is far easier said than done.