The problem is, we don’t consider synthesized and natural happiness...
In my never-ending quest to write articles that only a couple hundred people will ever read, I recently asked the advice of a fellow gamer for inspiration. He pointed me to a video from TED, that fount of ideas that makes everyone think they are an expert. In it, author Dan Gilbert poses the question of what makes us happy. You can watch his very interesting presentation here, but let me give you the condensed version. Humans seek happiness, but many of us don’t realize that we are actually capable of synthesizing it. We know that we are happy when we get something that we want. That’s what we call “natural” happiness. But suppose we don’t get what we want, or something bad happens. According to Gilbert, the human mind is capable of “synthesizing” happiness, accepting the circumstance and embracing its result. Have you ever looked back ten years later at a job you didn’t get, and realized that you are much happier for not getting it? That’s sythesized happiness.