Quicklet on TED Talks: Dan Gilbert: Why Are We Happy?

ABOUT THE BOOK

If you can’t shake the feeling that you’re stuck in the circumstances that surround you, you’re frustrated with the stagnation of your career’s momentum, or you yearn for something more than you already have, Dan Gilbert’s Why Are We Happy? lecture may help you gain perspective in unexpected ways. The resolution to your existential crisis won’t be found through fleeing the country or overhauling your entire existence. It can be found in your mind.

We live in a society that wants a lot and perpetuates subconscious entitlement and the expectation of a life that’s gluttonously filled with riches, and insists on incessant forward movement until you get everything you desire. Gilbert’s lecture suggests you may be happy if you don’t get those things, or even happier still if you succeed in accumulating your every wish and then lose everything. Some of his key points may be hard for the cynical to swallow at first, but Gilbert presents a strong piece of media that affirms the often uttered but rarely practiced adage that the true path to happiness is through ourselves.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Seth Leeper is a professional writer, blogger, and singer. He has written fashion columns and feature articles for AND and Xpress Magazines, maintained his own fashion blog at yourdailyfashionfix.blogspot.com, and contributed stories and poetry to Outspoken! e-zine. He has a B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. When he's not setting word to processor, he swims, jogs, and sings Linda Ronstadt classics.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

Think you’ll be a happier person as an instant millionaire rather than someone who just lost their right arm? Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling On Happiness, begs to differ. In a twenty-minute lecture on TED Talk, Gilbert asserts his position that happiness isn’t just found, but can be manufactured by our very own brains.

Gilbert opens with a look at the evolution of the human brain, which he says has tripled in mass in the last two million years to make room for new structures. Our ancestor, homo habilis, had a brain weighing one and a quarter pounds, but modern human brains weigh about three pounds. This is because the human skull evolved to make room for the prefrontal cortex, which has been referred to as the “CEO of the brain,” by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. It presides over cognitive and abstract functions and moderates how we socialize, helping to discern proper forms of communication from inappropriate outbursts.

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