The Happiness Trap
Theme of the Week: Bedrock Joy
BreakPoint WorldView
Monday, November 1, 2004
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Key Bible Verse: Many people say, "Who will show us better times?" … You have given me greater joy than those who have abundant harvests of grain and wine (Psalm 4:6–7). Bonus Reading: Matthew 6:19–21, 31–34
How do we predict what will make us happy? Are our predictions accurate? That's what psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is researching. Reporter Jon Gertner wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "Gilbert has found that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional re- actions to future events. We might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as we predicted."
It's sobering to realize how we base many important decisions on transitory emotions and wrong thinking. Science validates what the Bible teaches: Spending our lives chasing what we think we want is the way not to find happiness.
Look at the phrase the pursuit of happiness. We tend to interpret those words from the U.S. Declaration of Inde-pendence to mean that we're entitled to do whatever will make us happy at any given moment—exactly the tendency that Gilbert is warning us against. But America's founding fathers were talking about something very different: the freedom to make our best efforts to live a virtuous life. They judged this the path to true happiness.
In the same way, it would be odd to trust an unfamiliar God we haven't properly understood.
—BreakPoint WorldView
My Response: An assumption about experiencing happiness I need to re-evaluate is …
Adapted from "First Things First" in BreakPoint WorldView (Prison Fellowship, www.breakpoint.org, 12/03) by permission.
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Lord, help me pursue passing pleasures less and relish the enduring joy of Your presence more.
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