Stumbling on Happiness

But the past evoked by the amateur is make-believe. It never existed. It's a highlight reel that she edited together from events that almost took place or should have occurred. In a way, the amateur's re-imagined past is worse when it's true. Because then it's really gone. The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your

The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.

The present is a fact; the future is contingent. While an antidote to a fear of death is to embrace the present, we cannot remain there for long. At some point we want to know what use the current objects of our attention are to us, or how they might affect us for better or for worse, or how they compare to what we have seen before; and with these

Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. Under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bod