Synthetic Happiness Is Real Happiness

Imagine a gallery is giving away two free paintings. You are determining which to get and believe you should go with option A, when someone else takes it. So, you take option B instead. You secretly desired B more, but after getting accustomed to A you find that it is a much better choice and are completely happy with the painting your received. This is called synthetic happiness.

We tend to think that synthetic happiness (the happiness we manufacture when we don’t get exactly what we want) will never come close to the feeling of natural happiness, but Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says that is absolutely not true.

Gilbert even gives an example of a study done which measured the happiness of lottery winners and paraplegics. Surprisingly, they showed no difference in happiness a year after their situations occurred.

So what does this mean? This means that we are capable of being completely happy regardless of our situation.

So in the words of the Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

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