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Summary of Pursuit of Happiness

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“The Futile Pursuit of Happiness” Summary Most of us are used to the idea of predicting the way we will feel after an event not knowing that it’s most likely that we won’t feel that way, at least not for long. The reading “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness” by Jon Gertner, published in The New York Times, talks about how we always tend to get ahead of our feelings and don’t realize that our brains function in ways that we can’t control. Predicting how you will feel about something takes away the excitement of having an emotion on something new. Who even knows what makes us really happy? Most of us also don’t even know what we really want. Gertner talks about how Gilbert, a professor in Harvard’s department of psychology, claims that he calls “the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the “impact bias.”” (118). The purpose of that word to me is that it explains how predicting your emotion can impact the outcome of the actual result and being incorrect. An example is buying a new TV all happy and later seeing a newer version and wanting it, forgetting about the one you just bought and feeling “disappointed”. We always think that we will know our emotions because they’re ours but that’s not the case. Our brain really contributes a lot to this. “Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things.” and “Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.” (121) We’re always looking for ways to be happy so we look for actions that we think will bring us that outcome. Another example is when you’re in a heated situation. You really can’t predict ahead of time how you will feel because at that moment you’re doing what makes you happy but it might not be later on. This sums up how Gertner’s point of not being able to accurately predict our emotions on things is correct and how we should let

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