Variety Improves The Things That

Your Mistake Was Not In Imagining Things You Could Not Know—that Is, After All, What Imagination Is For. Rather, Your Mistake Was In Unthinkingly Treating What You Imagined As Though It Were An Accurate Representation Of The Facts.

The Truth Is, Bad Things Don't Affect Us As Profoundly As We Expect Them To. That's True Of Good Things, Too. We Adapt Very Quickly To Either.

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.

Variety Improves The Things That We Do Too Often, But It Rules The Things That We Don't Do Often Enough.

The Mistakes We Make When We Try To Imagine Our Personal Futures Are Also Lawful, Regular, And Systematic. They, Too, Have A Pattern That Tells Us About The Powers And Limits Of Foresight In Much The Same Way That Optical Illusions Tell Us About The Powers And Limits Of Eyesight.