Why aren’t we more happy?

The age-old question keeps coming up again and again. Why aren’t we more happy? You would think that happiness is so easy to obtain and you are right, it should be. But for most humans, depression comes along every now and then making life seem like the most miserable thing out there.

TEDLife is an ingenius conference gathering some of the greatest talkers in the world to discuss one thing: their ideas. One of my favorites is this video from Dan Gilbert in which he provides an answer to this question. He suggests that happiness is simply getting what we want compared to not getting what we want. He then goes on about synthetic happiness vs natural happiness. Synthetic happiness is when you make yourself believe your happy while normal happiness is when you actually get what you want. He concludes that both happinesses are actually on the same level although society places synthetic division on a lower level and he proves this with an experiment with amnesia patients. Well I won’t spoil the best parts for you as he is a pretty comical speaker as well. Enjoy the video

~Kevin X