One of my goals this year is to learn how to be happy independent of others. I’ve been around the block long enough to have heard that happiness can be manufactured–that you can make yourself happy. But like so many others, it turns out, I have convinced myself that such happiness is artificial. If you have to fake it, it can’t be as good, right?
Not necessarily. Dan Gilbert has researched this and, in this presentation for TedTV, shows that we already subconsciously generate happiness, and we never notice the difference. This is an interesting video: