Why Do We Stake so Much on What Might Happen..
...when humans are so bad at predicting the future?
My brother was in a car accident last week. He’s fine, it was slow and undramatic and his 1 and 3 year old thought it was hilarious, like being on a rollercoaster apparently.
But it means he has to buy a new car. When he told me what he’s looking to buy, I was surprised at the size of it, and thus the expense.
The way I see it, Charlie, is that my girls are going to be super tall (all the women in my family are over 5 foot 9) so I’m going to need a car that will fit them as they approach adulthood.
In other words, he’s buying a car based on what he thinks his kids will be like in 10+ years’ time, even though he will probably buy myriad cars before then.
Welcome to modern society. A place where we have an obsession with predicting the future, with terrifyingly inaccurate results.
We are terrible at fortune-telling
In a brilliant TED talk The Surprising Science Behind Happiness, Harvard professor Dan Gilbert talks extensively about Impact Bias. The Impact Bias says that all humans are bad at forecasting because we assume a feeling or event will impact us far longer than it actually does.
All of this becomes a real problem when you start to forge a future based on what might happen. When it doesn’t, you can be trapped in situations that are bad for your wallet, wellbeing and can severely impact your future.
I’ve seen friends buy 5 bedroom houses for their family before they’ve even conceived their first child. I had a chef acquaintance who bought a super expensive outdoor cooking set up to offer private BBQs, setting him back thousands of dollars before he even secured his first client (newsflash: the clients never came).
In other words, I’ve seen countless people throw money down the drain for unfit-for-purpose lives.
Bad at forecasting but brilliant at adapting
My best friend just announced this weekend that she and her husband are having a baby. I’ve just spent a very pleasant 4 days with them in their 1 bedroomed Berlin flat.
I asked them if they were going to move out to somewhere larger.
Why? The baby will be sleeping with us for a long time and we don’t know what they will need yet. Why would we move until they are even born?
The difference between my friend here and other people is that she isn’t looking far into the future and trying to guess what she and the baby might need. Instead, she has made a decision that her 1 bedroomed flat is perfectly fine and she’s going to enjoy living in it until it doesn’t work anymore. She has adapted her mindset to fit her situation.
And therein lies a secret that not many people know about:
You can synthesize happiness
The aforementioned Dan has spent years researching the phenomenon of synthesizing happiness. In other words, you can literally choose to be happy, even when things don’t go your way.
Of course, we don’t believe it.
We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as natural happiness - Dan Gilbert.
Except this simply isn’t true. Dan’s research has shown that it is absolutely of the same quality. Watch the YouTube video for yourself and see the proof.
This blew my mind.
It means that we don’t have to worry about forecasting the future, because whatever happens to us, we can simply choose to be happy with the results.
Amazingly, the happiness is felt even more keenly if we have no choice in the matter. Say my friend couldn’t afford to move from her one-bedroomed flat, or she had many years left on the lease. That lack of choice, research suggests, will actually make her decision to synthesize happiness even easier.
It sounds cuckoo because as Dan says, “what kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it?"
But it’s there, in scientific black and white.
My brother doesn’t need to worry about what car he has for his kids, because he can choose to be happy with whatever car he buys.
In other words, he can stop fortune-telling and start synthesizing.
Perhaps you can too.
As I’ve been in Berlin this week, it’s only fitting to say danke for reading!
I’ve been writing Simple + Straightforward for 3 months now, and I’d love to hear your feedback. What have you enjoyed, what would you want to see more of? Ping me a message at charliebrownwriter@gmail.com. I’ll always reply.
Finally, as always you can check out more of my writing over at medium.com. Here’s the referral link for those of you who want full access to the site whilst giving me a portion of your $5 membership fee which keeps the free Substack wheels turning.