Pursuit of happiness

I saw this video of Dan Gilbert, who's a "social psychologist" and holds a job at Harvard as a professor in psychology. It explores happiness, rather "synthetic happiness" as he calls it, an investigation into how human beings can convince themselves of happiness even in seemingly dire situations. Watch it here.

The great source of both misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of those situations may no doubt deserve to be prefered to others but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice - Adam Smith