overestimating how much it really matters

As it turns out, all of the things we think will make us massively happy or pitifully sad or otherwise affect us profoundly are simply not a big deal.

See, upon recommendation from a friend, I recently read a story that ran in the NY Times magazine a few years ago called "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness." It's about a few scientists who have been studying how we anticipate the affect a certain event will have on our happiness. They call it affect forecasting.

As the author explains it, we overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future events. We think a certain event, buying a new house, for example, will make us much happier for much longer. Similarly, we expect other events, such as losing a job or even a death in the family, to make us deeply sad for a very long time. Well, according to these guys, we're wrong.

I understand it has to do with adaptation. We tend to acclimate quickly to our situations so that the moments we thought would be much more intense soon become background noise.

This idea isn't particularly new to me, considering the last couple of years have brought a slew of large changes in my life, all of which now seem like no big deal (or at least not the end of the world, as I would have led you to believe at the time). I figured my ease with dealing with certain events came from me being a generally positive person who enjoys being happy enough to seek out positive aspects of situations. But perhaps a larger part of that is adaptation.

The catch is we keep doing it. Even the scientists discussed how they knew they were overestimating the future reaction, but they continued to do it. We continue to overshoot our expectations, putting way too much weight on how we think a certain thing or event will affect us.

My point is that even though we know this - I know this and recognized it as I read about it and similarly recognized how in the end, the affect is much more muted than expected - we still get worked up.

I am still losing sleep over getting a job and moving to a different city. I want the perfect job and think I will just be crushed if I don't get it. I will certainly be miserable if I don't move to an awesome city. And while the truth is that it likely won't be that big of a deal, I still sweat it.

How do we avoid that? Well, one of the researchers noted that he didn't want to.

If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ''The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,'' he says. ''When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn't sweat as much because you'd say: 'You know, I'll be happy in both. I'll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there's no use in killing myself for the next week.' But maybe our caricatures of the future -- these overinflated assessments of how good or bad things will be -- maybe it's these illusory assessments that keep us moving in one direction over the other. Maybe we don't want a society of people who shrug and say, 'It won't really make a difference.'