Dan Gilbert The New Era Of Positive Psychology

Majority of the people in today’s society would consider that positive psychology and happiness now is vastly different than it was in the past. This change was sparked by understanding that feelings are not forever, and that your emotions are not the endpoints in your life. Modern science has provided humanity with classifications of mental illnesses and ways to interpret the human brain and its functionalities during certain stages in one’s lifetime. This way of thinking focuses on humans prospering when faced with adversity. When watching the two videos, “The New Era of Positive Psychology,” featuring Martin Seligman and “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” featuring Dan Gilbert, I learned a lot about psychology and its overall effect …show more content…
One of the main theme’s in his presentation is that he brings into question the measurement of happiness and how humans synthesize it, but believe that happiness should be found. Synthetic happiness is what we make of when we do not get what we want and natural happiness is when we get what we want. Surprisingly synthetic happiness is just as real and humane as natural happiness can be. Sometimes we are not even aware of the process that our own brain does to trick us, so we believe that this happiness is natural. Our own subconscious makes us feel like we are happy. I think a huge message that Dan Gilbert is portraying and depicting in his Ted Talk is that humans are able to create their own happiness, despite the outcomes of their life’s events. I think through watching his talk it is fascinating to know that if we are more aware that we can create our own happiness, despite the troubling events we go through, our outlook on our lives can completely change. We often have biased perceptions and wrong ideas of what makes humans happy. Dan Gilbert explains this through an example that even after a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have an equal amount of happiness. However, as humans we naturally think that lottery winners would be much happier than paraplegics because that is what we believe would be happier. This shows that we as humans are restricted in what happiness can be and where it can come from. Overall, I thought Dan Gilbert’s Ted Talk really opened my eyes to what and where happiness can stem from. It’s shocking that our brains are capable of so much and that our decisions are already made up through our subconscious minds. Happiness can be found in many places, but it can also be something that we can stumble upon. As Gilbert says there is a misconception that humans search for happiness, but in reality we actually synthesize it, and we feel