Harvard's Happiness Course: A 10,000-Word Deep Dive | Feifan 22

What We’ll Cover

Did you know that when our brains imagine happiness, they use a “filling-in” mechanism that makes our predictions about happiness inaccurate? The pain of heartbreak and unemployment doesn’t last as long as we imagine, because we have a psychological immune system that helps us heal quickly. And memory distorts our experience of happiness: it only retrieves the “peak moments” and “ending feelings,” making it impossible for us to draw lessons about happiness from our past memories.

This deep dive draws on decades of research by Harvard’s “happiness professor” to reveal the mistakes people commonly make when predicting happiness, while offering insights from science to help us take fewer wrong turns in our pursuit of happiness.

You’ll Hear

• Research by Harvard’s “happiness professor”—correcting 90% of our misconceptions about happiness
• The four major cognitive traps around happiness, and how to predict happiness scientifically
• Key insights for pursuing happiness—and meeting happiness when you least expect it

Quotes from This Episode

The present is a merciless shackle, trapping our imagination of future happiness firmly in this moment.

Lower your fixation on happiness, and when something good arrives in the future, it becomes an extra gain—a little joy you can count as a bonus.

Happiness isn’t about perfectly predicting and controlling the future. It’s about continually learning from life’s repeated tumbles and bumps, constantly recalibrating our inner happiness compass, and eventually meeting happiness when we least expect it, somewhere around an unremarkable corner.

About the Author

Daniel Gilbert　Harvard University’s “happiness professor,” a leading expert in happiness research, and one of the “50 Most Influential Living Social Psychologists” of our time.