Dan Gilbert is a psychologist and professor who is an expert affective forecasting. AF is a term he coined for “predicting how you would feel about a hypothetical event that occurs in the future”. This process applies to both positive and negative events.
He’s studied how this applies to a person’s ability to predict what would increase or decrease their happiness. He said people tend to overestimate the impact and duration that negative events have on happiness. The examples he studied included death of a loved one, health issues, financial loss and divorce.
Gilbert says that the impact of these losses on a person’s happiness aren’t as long or as severe as most people would expect because people are adaptable.
He acknowledges that all of these events can cause a deep and immediate period of pain. Studies show that over time people return to the baseline of happiness they had before the negative event.
That has been my experience throughout my entire life. With almost every negative event or bad situation, eventually I adapted.
For some of the worst periods, at the time, it felt like the pain would never end:
- When we abruptly moved and changed schools in the middle the year, I was lonely, isolated, afraid and had a complete loss of identity. It took me about half a year to get accustomed to my new school, make new friends and figure out my place.
- When my wife was undergoing multiple healthcare care problems and I was caring for her over a period of about 20 years, sometimes it felt like things would ever get better. Things usually improved or at least reached a manageable state that we could accommodate and adjust our loves around.
- After my wife died from cancer I fell apart. I wasn’t sure I could go on without her. It took two years before I felt OK enough to stop thinking about killing myself. Then, slowly, my appreciation of life continued to go up.
I generally don’t pay much attention to “happiness experts” because there’s so much pop psychology banal bullshit being circulated that it’s maddening.
Like “the loneliness epidemic”, the “crises of young men”, the “birth rate decline emergency”, the focus on happiness is just one more contemporary “crisis” that is over analyzed to generate clicks, sell books and promote sleazy money making solutions.
That said, my take away from Gilbert’s research is one simple truth:
You’ll get used to it.
It aligns well with my own beliefs and practices.
