Happiness - Must Watch Video

Found via Tony O'Driscoll. I guess Dan Gilbert - author of Stumbling on Happiness was the keynote at Training 2007. Tony was nice enough to point us to a video from a Ted talk:

You really should watch this. It contains a bunch of things that completely make sense now that you know and raises some interesting questions:

• Natural happiness is a result of "good results" - happy that you won the lottery
• Synthesized happiness is a result of adjusting to your situation - being paralyzed and adjusting to your new life
• While we may believe that natural happiness is somehow better than synthesized happiness, there really is no difference - people just are happy.
• People who won the lottery and people who are paralyzed are equally happy one year after the event.
• The brain is amazingly good at synthesizing happiness. The 3 moving to two and 4 moving to 5 in the video is great stuff.
• Freedom (lots of choices) is the enemy of synthesized happiness. If you are stuck, you will be happier than if you have lots of choices.

This explains to me why it's hard to buy when there are so many choices. I don't want buyers remorse. Heaven forbid I have the option to return something so I can continue to fret about my decision. Having someone buy it for me or make a strong recommendation that locks me in - makes me happier with the choice. And, if I'm truly locked into the choice, then my brain will continually adjust to make me even happier.

I can't wait to hear what Stephen Downes, Jay Cross and the rest of the "freedom is good" - "control is bad" has to say about this. :)