Our Brain Accepts What The

The Secret Of Happiness Is Variety, But The Secret Of Variety, Like The Secret Of All Spices, Is Knowing When To Use It.

Few Of Us Can Accurately Gauge How We Will Feel Tomorrow Or Next Week. That's Why When You Go To The Supermarket On An Empty Stomach, You'll Buy Too Much, And If You Shop After A Big Meal, You'll Buy Too Little.

We All Have Direct Experience With Things That Do Or Don't Make Us Happy, We All Have Friends, Therapists, Cabdrivers, And Talk-show Hosts Who Tell Us About Things That Will Or Won't Make Us Happy, And Yet, Despite All This Practice And All This Coaching, Our Search For Happiness Often Culminates In A Stinky Mess. We Expect The Next Car, The Next House, Or The Next Promotion To Make Us Happy Even Though The Last Ones Didn't And Even Though Others Keep Telling Us That The Next Ones Won't.

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

The Human Brain Is The Only Object In The Known Universe That Can Predict Its Own Future And Tell Its On Fortune. The Fact That We Can Make Disastrous Decisions Even As We Foresee Their Consequences Is The Great, Unsolved Mystery Of Human Behavior. When You Hold Your Fate In Your Hands, Why Would You Ever Make A Fist?