Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness “synthetic happiness,” and he says it’s “every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”  This video is from the 2004 TED conference.

[flv]http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/DANGILBERT_high.flv[/flv]

More conference information on TED can be found here.  The original video can be found here along with other great presentations.  I would encourage you to take some time and view as many as you can.