Where Happiness Hides

Sonja Lyubomirsky on the Hidden Brain podcast.

Shankar Vedantam: As we’ve seen, hedonic adaptation can rob us of happiness, but it can also work in our favor when times are bad. How you feel about a setback that happens to you is rarely how you will feel about it after two weeks or two months or two years. It’s also the case that sometimes things that appear like disasters are not in fact disasters. Sonja likes a parable about this idea from ancient China.

Sonja then tells the story of the Chinese farmer.

Shankar Vedantam: I love the line you have in the book from William Blake that describes this so elegantly.

Sonja Lyubomirsky: Yes, I love William Blake, he has this great line from Auguries of Innocence, “Joy and woe are woven fine.”