Predicting emotional futures: David Gilbert

A really interesting interview that came via The New Sheltin Wet&Dry. It seems alot of people are realtively successful in recovering from unhappiness yet in this article David Gilbert questions just how effective we are in predicting what will make us culmulatively more happy. He argues that just as we recover from being too unhappy we have an inherent ability to combat being too happy.

"Human resilience is really quite astonishing. People are not the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be. People who suffer real tragedy and trauma typically recover more quickly than they expect to and often return to their original level of happiness, or something close to it. That’s the good news—we are a hardy species, even though we don’t know this about ourselves. The bad news is that the good things that happen to us don’t feel as good or last as long as we think they will. So all that wonderful stuff we’re aiming for—winning the lottery, getting promoted, whatever we think will change our lives—probably won’t do it after all. We’re resilient in both directions. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy."

All this ties in pretty interestingly with a survey undertaken in the USA and in the UK looking at happiness in our populations: link here. It seems that we are at our most unhappiest at the age of 44, the age when we are perhaps expecting to be most successful having slogged away making a career or life in our younger years.