Great Throughts Treasury

"We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence."

"Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage."

"The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices."

"If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people."

"Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants."

"Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one."

"Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches."

"Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy."

"The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it."

"If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that perpetually stuck on north is worthless."

"The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes."

"Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person."

"The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become."

"What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they’re overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being."

"Each of us is trapped in a place, a time and a circumstance and our attempt to use our mind to transcend those boundaries are more often than not ineffective."

"People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end."

"The average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name."

"The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants"

"The eye and brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies; theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness."

"Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous­, that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. So what does all of this have to do with forecasting our emotional futures? As we are about to see, we may live at the fulcrum of reality and illusion, but most of us don't know our own address."

"We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy."

"Not to think about the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe to do what it was designed to do, and like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists that suggestion."

"The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them."

"A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it. We need to be defended­ -- not defenseless or defensive­ -- and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts."

"Imagination is the poor man’s wormhole. We can't do what we'd really like to do -- namely, travel through time, pay a visit to our future selves, and see how happy those selves are­ -- and so we imagine the future instead of actually going there. But if we cannot travel in the dimension of time, we can travel in the dimensions of space, and the chances are pretty good that somewhere in those other three dimensions there is another human being who is actually experiencing the event that we are merely thinking about."

"To learn from experience, we must remember it, and for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend."

"People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others."

"If it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness."

"The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness. "

"Which is more important - experience or memory of experience? If you could have an hour of ecstasy that you'd forever remember as torture, or an hour of torture that you'd forever remember as ecstasy, which would you prefer?"

"People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others. "

"When we have an experience­ -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage"

"If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average."

"'Reality' is a movie generated by our brains. Because we don't realize this, we are far too confident that the stuff appearing in the movie is actually 'out there' in the world when, in fact, it's not."

"Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?"

"To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion."

"The production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth."

"Because we can feel our own emotions but must infer the emotions of others by watching their faces and listening to their voices, we often have the impression that others don?t experience the same intensity of emotion we do, which is why we expect others to recognize our feelings even when we can?t recognize theirs? We don?t always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique? Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities ? minds unlike any others ? and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us."

"Every human culture tells its members that having children will make them happy? The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true. This doesn?t mean that we should all now quit our jobs and abandon our families. Rather, it means that while we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness, we are actually doing these things for reasons beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social network that rises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated."

"Imagination has three shortcomings? its first shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us? The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important? Imagination?s second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future? Imagination?s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen ? in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better."

"Happiness is a word that we generally used to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it? Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively."

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they?re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you?ve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change."

"What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you?ve been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss?s office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol?"

"The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor?s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something ? a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger ? we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance."

"Our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they?d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn?t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack."