خلاصه ی غلبه بر تعصب ها

But before we finish, quick review of everything we’ve seen so far.

So we said, all this stuff doesn’t make us as happy as we think.

And now we know why, right?

We’ve seen the biases.

We’ve also seen intentional strategies that will let us start feeling happy about this stuff again.

This is the good news is that, all this stuff can in fact make us happy if we reset our reference points, if we don’t hedonically adapt to it.

And now you guys have good strategies to make all this stuff good again, which is pretty sweet.

Usually it’s not, but now you guys have the power to do it better.

And so then we said okay, we have this miswanting, we want the wrong stuff.

Why?

We said well, our mind has these crazy things.

We have the fact that we just like to think things are good when they’re not going to be, we think things are going to be better than they are.

We have this mind that just doesn’t think in terms of absolutes.

It just like thinks in terms of comparisons.

We have minds that get used to things even if we don’t believe they’re going to, you know we don’t realize they’re going to.

We said okay, those are pretty annoying features, how can we overcome these?

And that’s what we talked about today.

We said well, there are great strategies.

You can actually intentionally put habits in your life that change this, but the emphasis is on that intentionally.

You could walk out of this lecture, and not change anything, and you’re not going to be any happier.

The things that you have to do to become happier, are actually going to take work.

They’re going to feel effortful at first when you start them, when you first sit down to write this gratitude thing it’s not like that’s going to be a habit that you have, you have to put that in place for the first time.

And it’s going to feel like a little kitschy, it’s going to feel effortful, it’s not going to be your normal way of doing things, but if you put those habits into place, all of a sudden things will be better.

We talked about two kinds of ways you can do that.

Getting over your getting used to stuff, thwarting your own adaptation, and then also resetting your reference points.

Finding ways to really get the right reference points in there, so you can be happy about the stuff that you’re happy about.

But, if you’re paying attention, we’ve gone through all these annoying features and we’ve been cleaving them off.

We cleaved off hedonic adaptation, we cleaved off the fact that we think in terms of reference points.

But there’s one that we haven’t cut off yet.

Which is this perhaps even the most annoying feature which is that our strongest intuitions are wrong.

I’ve told you how to make all those things in your life that you thought were going to be good, but won’t be very good unless you take intentional actions.

I’ve taught you how to make them good again.

But we haven’t yet done is all of the stuff that miswanting is confusing us about.

Like I’ve told you that the stuff that we want, is missing some other good stuff that’s just going to naturally make us happy.

So, what are those other things?

What are the things that we should be wanting, we didn’t realize that yet?

And that’s why I’m going to keep you guys for one more week, because that’s what we’re going to do next time.