Everything you know about happiness is wrong, according to Professor Daniel Gilbert, who (unlike a lot of the professors quoted authoritatively in magazine articles) seems to have really made some strides in knowing what he’s talking about:

Gilbert ponders the subject that is known, thanks largely to him, as affective forecasting — the how and why and error of human perceptions of time, value, reward, sorrow, and, yes, happiness. Just as we often recall the past as we’d like to remember it instead of as it was, so do we predict incorrectly what the future will be like, including our emotional responses to it. This is important, he says, because it influences our attempts at planning — and we do it again and again. . . .

What’s responsible for our self-deception? According to Gilbert, blame imagination, because its forces and flaws distort our predictions and our recollections. Imagination works powerfully and quickly, he explains, but it tends to make us believe that the future we envision will be a lot like the present we are experiencing. And when we imagine an event in that future, he explains, we humans consistently overestimate the length and intensity of our emotional response to it. As he writes: “Teenagers get tattoos because they are confident that DEATH ROCKS will always be an appealing motto …” . . .

Gilbert has said that on an imaginary happiness scale of 0 to 100, humans tend to place themselves around the 75-point mark. Regardless of our baseline happiness “level,” a setback will drag us down the scale or some amazing stroke of luck bump us up, but only briefly — within a matter of months from the “life-changing” event, we’re pretty much right back where we started.

“Basically, the death of your entire family is the kind of event it takes to have a major impact on you for a very long time,” he says.
Can money buy happiness? Sort of. That is, a little more money can buy the poor a lot of happiness, but only a lot more money can buy the rich even a little happiness. Material wealth has, as Gilbert says, “very diminishing returns.” A far more reliable indicator of a person’s happiness is his or her wealth of personal relationships.

That’s “relationships.”  Not “followers.”

I have had some weird experiences out there in social space, which by all lights is surely getting creepier and creepier.

First a few months ago there was this lady on LinkedIn who was pushing so so hard to make some kind of presence for herself.  She kept pressing and pressing to build this kind of community around her, not without some success.  Seeing as how she didn’t seem to have an actual day job (I don’t think just anyone can list themselves as “visionary” or “happenings mover” or whatever) it seemed no worse than all the other snake oil, and at first I thought perhaps she had something to say in there.

But I knew something was weird, including the fact that she kept saying in her postings that certain people were hacking her LinkedIn account and things.  I mean, I guess anything’s possible.  But then she started intensely hitting me with requests to tweet or link to these articles she wrote, and I sent her a message saying that, hey, maybe she’s being a little overly aggressive here?

Man.  Big mistake!  Check out this dialogue — I had to recreate my lines because I didn’t keep them, but hers I did (for the authorities):

NuttyLady: Would you please RT [re-tweet] a couple of my stories you like most today? I’m still not getting into the Key Word Search stream at all!

Me: Sure, I did that in fact just yesterday, but you know, you are maybe pushing a little hard here?  Maybe you want to RT some of my links?

NuttyLady: I have to rely on my network to get any exposure to the general Twitter audience. Thanks so much for your help.

Me: No, I get that, no problem, I just saying you’re asking a lot and it seems kind of one-sided.

NuttyLady: I am not getting into the Key Word searches because of malicious code someone put on my account. I am not automated and do everything myself.

NuttyLady (a minute later):  I am a professional writer with more stories to my credit than most people at, say, Huffington Post. You don’t mind RT’ing their stories!

I don’t?  Actually if I have ever RT’ed something from Huffington Post that would be news to me.  It could have happened by accident, but… while I was preparing that response, this came in:

NuttyLady: You are showing bias towards “Little Media” versus “Big Media.”

And with that she not only unfollowed me — she BLOCKED me so I couldn’t respond to her — and deleted me as a connection on LinkedIn!!

No, no, believe me — I’m grateful.  But I just wasn’t ready for that kind of nuttiness out of nowhere.  What with her Ivy League Ph.D. and all.

I lived.  And, mind you, this is all in the context of a very, very contracted social networking profile and much less time spent on this stuff than at this point a year ago, or six months ago.  Yet even as I narrow the gauge of my efforts, more and more loons parade through view via the keyhole.

Like yesterday — this guy with no identifying information on his profile whatsoever friends my law firm’s Facebook page, which I administer.  And I am not just adding people to my firm’s visible, online social networks.  There has to be some rationale, right?  So I ask him, as nice as pie, like this (again, the name has been changed to protect the unhinged):

Goetz Fitzpatrick January 5 at 12:00pm

Hi, Guy. Read the rest of this entry »