The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
Interpretation
We tend to adjust our emotions to both negative and positive experiences more rapidly than we anticipate.
This quote by Daniel Gilbert emphasizes the human capacity for emotional adaptation. It suggests that our emotional responses to both adverse and favorable events are not as intense or lasting as we might expect, highlighting the resilience and adaptability of the human psyche when confronted with life's ups and downs.
In practice
In a discussion about overcoming challenges, you might include this quote to illustrate resilience.
Part of us believes the new car is better because it lasts longer. But, in fact, that's the worst thing about the new car. It will stay around to disappoint you, whereas a trip to Europe is over. It evaporates. It has the good sense to go away, and you are left with nothing but a wonderful memory.
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They, too, have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.
When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage
Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.
What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they’re overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being.
Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior.
Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.
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