Happiness... don't overrate the differences among choices...

TURGID TRUTH

"The great source of both the miseries and disorders of human life, seem to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another...Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by the remorse from the horror of our own injustice"

Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759"


in layman's terms: "Yes some thing are better than others, we should have preferences that lead us into one future over the other, but when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the differences between these two futures, we put ourselves at risk.

When our ambition is bounded it leads us to work joyfully, when our ambition is unbounded it lead us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others and to sacrafice things of real value.

When our fears are bounded we're prudent, we're cautions and we're thoughtful, when our fears are unbounded we're and overblown we're reckless and we're cowardly.

Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing we chose Experiences."

-Dan Gilbert