On Halloween day, 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was surfing with a friend. While paddling on her board, she felt a sudden, sharp tugging sensation below her left shoulder. A tiger shark had bitten off her entire arm.

Just a few months earlier in Utah, mountaineer Aron Ralston was out hiking when his arm (the right one) became pinned under a boulder. After five days of soul-searching and surviving off burritos and his own urine, he self-amputated with a dull-bladed multi-tool.

Both Hamilton and Ralston have since expressed gratitude for their horrifying ordeals. “It was a terrible thing that happened to me,” Hamilton later told an interviewer, “but so many good things have come out of it that it has turned into a beautiful thing.” ¹Ralston, meanwhile, called his experience “a blessing.”²

Hamilton and Ralston aren’t unique. Plenty of people — some more famous than others — have become paralyzed, gone blind, lost limbs, or experienced some other life-altering event and were afterward glad about what had happened to them.

“That’s nice,” I hear you say. “But I’d rather be shot in the head than paralyzed from the neck down. No way you’ll see me counting my blessings in a wheelchair.” In the immediate aftermath of your misfortune, you might be right.

In the long run, you’re probably — thankfully — wrong.

The curse (and blessing) of presentism

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert is one of the world’s foremost authorities on why people are bad at predicting what will make them happy — and unhappy. 

One of the biggest culprits, according to Gilbert, is “presentism.”

Presentism assumes that how we feel about something right now will also be how we feel about it later. We all do this in small ways without realizing it. If you’ve ever grocery-shopped while hungry and bought a month’s worth of chicken nuggets, you’ve experienced presentism.

In all fairness to our brains, they don’t have data about the future. So, being good and dutiful little gray-mattered lumps, they do their best to fill in the missing gaps — in this case, assuming that we will continue to act and feel the same way tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and ten years from now.

Impact bias is one of presentism’s many incarnations. We tend to overestimate how much and how long something will affect us.

A study in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, followed several thousand individuals over 14 years. Some of these participants experienced serious hardship during this time, including widowhood, job loss, and disability. A few experienced the happier (for most of us) phenomenon of getting married. ³

The hardship-experiencing participants overestimated how unhappy they would be in the years following their loss. In all three cases — widowhood, disability, job loss — they became more satisfied with their lives over the next five years, not less, until they returned to roughly their original level of life satisfaction. In some cases, their life satisfaction was even higher.

And the ones who got married? They were wearing rose-colored glasses that they eventually had to remove. It turns out that impact bias — and our crappiness at reading the future — moves in both directions. We may overestimate how unhappy something will make us, but we’re just as bad at thinking we know what will make us happy.

For example, living in California.

The “California Effect”

I live in the Greater Phoenix area, where it regularly reaches 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. I have recurring daydreams of living near the breezy, 65-degree shoreline of Santa Barbara. But according to research, people who live in California aren’t happier. ⁴

Nor are people who win the lottery and could theoretically move to California (or anywhere else, for that matter). ⁵

How on earth is this possible?

One big reason is our brains’ lightning-fast reflex of omission. We’re so good at leaving out details when we imagine things that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. When I look at the future through my “prospectiscope” at life in Santa Barbara, I’m looking only at farmer’s markets, art walks, and fishing excursions. I’m not looking at grocery runs in the cold rain or dealing with neighbors who play music too loudly.

Likewise, the lottery winner eventually realizes that her one-time windfall doesn’t solve her anxiety or her inner loneliness. Or her bad financial habits. 

This is either bad news or good news, depending on how you look at it. And I choose to look at it as good news. It means that your external situation — the part you often can’t control — isn’t what matters the most. What matters is perspective.

Gilbert notes:

The tendency that causes us to overestimate the happiness of Californians also causes us to underestimate the happiness of people with chronic illnesses or disabilities. For example, when sighted people imagine being blind, they seem to forget that blindness is not a full-time job. Blind people can’t see, but they do most of the things that sighted people do — they go on picnics, pay their taxes, listen to music, get stuck in traffic — and thus they are just as happy as sighted people are. ⁶

This may sound as if our brains are in some weird sort of conspiracy against us. On the contrary, they’re doing their darndest to help. But they can’t, due to a sheer lack of information. If someone asked me, “What do you think it feels like to be blind?” I admit that my first thought is sitting in a room alone, disoriented, and full of despair. Only with some effort do I imagine talking with friends, eating madeleines, and walking on the beach.

That dreaded old chestnut about “happiness being inside you” turns out to be mostly true. What something looks like on the outside is worlds apart from how it feels to live it.

A dance between reality and illusion

You may be thinking after all this, as I did: “There must be a catch. How can people be this bad at predicting their own happiness levels? How does winning the lottery not solve most of my problems? How could I ever see losing my arm as a blessing?”

There is an answer here as well. One answer, anyway.

In addition to presentism, we have what Gilbert calls the brain’s “immune system.” The brain, wise creature that it is, protects itself by trying to see life events in the best light possible. Including tragedy.

It’s a delicate dance between reality and illusion. We need to be awake to the seriousness of what happens to us, but too much trauma will cripple and even destroy us. As Gilbert puts it, “If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.”

It’s not that Ralston and Hamilton are lying when they say that they feel blessed to be one-armed. But they are grateful to be alive, and they’re grateful for all the opportunities that have come their way since recovering from their horrible ordeals.

More importantly, they have no access to a crystal ball featuring an alternative life with no sharks or boulders. It’s almost illogical of them not to see it as a positive thing. Your life events forge your identity. You can’t, as the 19th-century linguist Jane Harrison memorably put it, “unroll the snowball that is you.”

“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

Our future selves are not our present selves. I am not thrilled at the idea of moving to Alaska or having a baby with a disability, but my future self could well embrace both of these realities. My future self is wiser than me (or at least more experienced). I am forced to relinquish control by trusting her.

The Stoic sage Epictetus understood very well the riddle of separating your thoughts from things that happen. “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to,” he advises, “but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

Epictetus lived a good 2,000 years ahead of modern neurobiology and psychology, but he knew what was up. We can’t predict what will make us happy. We can’t know that something will ruin our life until it happens, unless it happens. We can’t control the future, but our brains are surprisingly good at adapting to it.

The hardest thing may simply be to put down our prospectiscopes and trust in our untested capacity for facing the unknown.

***

Read Next: 3 Ancient Solutions to the Problem of Happiness →

1. Mallozzi, V. M. (2011, April 2). 30 Seconds: With Bethany Hamilton. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/sports/03seconds.html
2. Learn more about Ralston’s story here
3. Odermatt, R., & Stutzer, A. (2018). (Mis-)Predicted Subjective Well-Being Following Life Events. Journal of the European Economic Association, 17(1), 245–283. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvy005
4. See here.
5. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-27. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917
6. Gilbert, Daniel Todd. Stumbling on Happiness. Kindle ed., Vintage, 2 May 2006.