If you spent one out of every eight hours living in my state you would be required to pay taxes, which is to say that in some very real sense, each of us is a part-time resident of tomorrow.

Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once youve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.

Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy.

The story is a bit like a river that crosses borders without benefit of passport because no single science has ever produced a compelling solution to the puzzle.

Weaving together facts and theories from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, this book allows an account to emerge that I personally find convincing but whose merits you will have to judge for yourself.

One particularly idiotic question we like to ask children is this: What do you want to be when you grow up Small children look appropriately puzzled, worried perhaps that our question implies they are at some risk of growing down.

If they answer at all, they generally come up with things like the candy guy or a tree climber.

We chuckle because the odds that the child will ever become the candy guy or a tree climber are vanishingly small, and they are vanishingly small because these are not the sorts of things that most children will want to be once they are old enough to ask idiotic questions themselves.

But notice that while these are the wrong answers to our question, they are the right answers to another question, namely, What do you want to be now Small children cannot say what they want to be later because they dont really understand what later means.

When a thirtyish Manhattanite is asked where she thinks she might retire, she mentions Miami, Phoenix, or some other hotbed of social rest.

She may love her gritty urban existence right now, but she can imagine that in a few decades she will value bingo and prompt medical attention more than art museums and squeegee men.

Unlike the child who can only think about how things are, the adult is able to think about how things will be.

At some point between our high chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about later.

What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future.

We feel anxiety when we anticipate that something bad will happen, and we plan by imagining how our actions will unfold over time.

Planning requires that we peer into our futures, and anxiety is one of the reactions we may have when we do.

Without it we are trapped in the moment, unable to imagine tomorrow and hence unworried about what it may bring.

As scientists now recognize, the frontal lobe empowers healthy human adults with the capacity to consider the selfs extended existence throughout time.

As such, people whose frontal lobe is damaged are described by those who study them as being bound to present stimuli, or locked into immediate space and time, or as displaying a tendency toward temporal concreteness.

In other words, like candy guys and tree climbers, they live in a world without later.

The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.

Not to think about the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe not to do what it was designed to do, and like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists this suggestion.

When people are asked to report how much they think about the past, present, and future, they claim to think about the future the most.

When researchers actually count the items that float along in the average persons stream of consciousness, they find that about 12 percent of our daily thoughts are about the future.

Daniel Gilbert Stumbling Happiness Pdf