The happiness of No Regrets.

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, talks about how we overvalue choice. (TED video on youtube). In his experiments, people felt much better living with choices that cannot be changed at a later date, though before the experiment they expressed a strong preference (66 percent of participants) for reversible choices. That is, we prefer to be unhappy.

Here's a classic song that makes Dan's point quite forcefully:




tags: psychology, control,  video