About happiness: we synthesize happiness, we are not finding it. Synthetic happiness is as strong as found happiness.
- quoting lots of nice stories ... impact is much overrated, e.g. paraplegics & lottery winners show same happiness after the event is back one year or so!
And with an example of people not being able to memorize things, he shows that we seem to truely change what we get happiness out, not simply retrofitting to what we got in the past and accommodating this.
This mechanism works better having no choice, being stuck! But we do think we need freedom of choice at same time!
Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy