“Perhaps not right away,” but eventually the regret will recede. Or will it? What if the regret relates to the regretful investment in a business or a failure to avail oneself of an investment opportunity? Does regret of the heart (such as Bergman experienced) exist longer or hurt more than regret of the pocketbook?
Authentic Happiness
Gilbert (2011, pp. 262-263) concludes his examination of happiness with the following comments:
“Without a formula for predicting utility, we tend to do what only our species does: imagine. Our brains have a unique structure that allows us to mentally trans port ourselves into future circumstances and then ask ourselves how it feels to be there. Rather than calculating utilities with mathematical precision, we simply step into tomorrow’s shoes and see how well they fit. Our ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen enables us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without taking them.”
It is in these last statements in his book that we find Gilbert fully abandoning a mechanical, rational, and mathematically based mode (utility) for determining our sense of personal happiness. Instead, he is pointing to our capacity to lean into the future and, as Otto Scharmer (2016) suggests, learn into the future, as a primary venue for creating and preserving happiness. We lean into the future by testing out different outcomes to “see how well they fit.” We learn into the future by anticipating our mistakes and correcting them before they occur. This leaning and learning into the future is not easy. As Gilbert (2011, p. 263) notes, our venture into the future is often filled with pitfalls:
“If nature has given us a greater gift, no one has named it. And yet, as impressive as it is, our ability to simulate future selves and future circumstances is by no means perfect. When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.”
He points once again to the inadequacy of a mathematical approach to happiness and future planning (offered by Bernoulli). We must instead move forward with our personal construction of happiness:
“Daniel Bernoulli dreamed of a world in which a simple formula would allow us all to determine our futures with perspicacity and foresight. But foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there, or do that. There is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.”
Daniel Gilbert seems to be saying that authentic happiness is an individual matter and that we arrive at both a definition of happiness and at plans to find happiness in our future, by gradual approximations (stumbling) and by continuous learning as we lean forward into our future.
