present tense

Last summer I read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert I can’t say it changed my life; I think my life was already changing. But it did significantly change the way I think about the events that impact my life and the decisions I have to make to cope with them.

In the foreword to the book, the author invites us to view our future selves (ten minutes from now or ten years from now) as our children and to consider that the things we do now, such as buy an ice cream cone or put money into our retirement account, are for their benefit. And he reminds us that, like our children, our future selves are rarely as grateful for our efforts as we would expect. He spends much of the rest of the book addressing the question “Why are we so bad at predicting what will make us happy and what will make us unhappy?” His answer is carefully constructed, with details and supporting evidence provided by a variety of psychological studies.

Now you might be worried that a Harvard professor equipped with studies and evidence could easily make even the subject of happiness dry and uninteresting. Fear not. “Stumbling on Happiness” reached the New York Times best seller list because it is both edifying and entertaining as well as educational. (And not because people thought it was a self-help book, which it most certainly is not.) Gilbert writes as well or better than the best of our recent bestselling non fiction writers. (Think of Steven Levitt or Malcom Gladwell, both of whom enthusiastically endorse the book on the front of the current edition’s dust cover.)

If you want an idea of how engaging Gilbert can be, before you read this book, I recommend that you spend twenty minutes watching a video of his presentation at the 2005 TED conference (http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/index.cfm?flashEnabled=1 ). It’s a perfect example of how a person who knows how important entertainment is to teaching, and who has had lots of practice, can present scientific arguments, backed up by lots of data, and hold your attention for as long as he needs it. If you don’t want to watch it on your computer, download the audio to your mp3 player and listen to it while walking; he doesn’t depend on visuals to succeed.

I won’t tell you about the book’s answer to the question “Why are we so bad at knowing what makes us happy or unhappy?”. Gilbert doesn’t think we can (or will) get better at that anyway. But I’ll tell you the punch line of the TED talk which is this: If we human beings were aware of how consistently we overestimate how happy “good” things will make us, or how unhappy “bad” things will makes us, we would be better, more moral people. We wouldn’t react with an exaggerated fear of bad consequences nor would we be overly motivated by greed (or lust or envy). And we wouldn’t saddle our future selves with shame or embarrassment (or jail time) because of decisions we made while reacting to our poorly informed estimates of our future happiness.

If you know this, it helps you to make decisions without fear of making the wrong decision (you’ll be happy anyway) and allows you to face an unexpected and unpleasant change in your life (e.g. the loss of your job) without a complete sense of panic.

I recently finished an eight year stint with a large corporation and had to give up my standard issue corporate laptop and buy my own. I already owned a good deskside computer which I bought in preparation for a return to self employment but I can’t imagine functioning without a portable anymore.

A tablet computer seemed like a good choice because I feel that the more input and output channels a computer has the more useful it will be. Also I had a tablet in the early nineties and I thought it was pretty cool then. It’s surprising that tablet computing hasn’t been more successful. There are only a limited number of models available and, consequently, only a limited amount of software that takes advantage of the pen features.

After talking about it with Sean Russell, who loves his HP TC4200, I decided to get the new version, the TC4400. At four and a half pounds it was a bit heavier than I was hoping for but, quite simply, I was seduced by power and money (a dual core Pentium, a gig of RAM and a good deal on eBay).

I planned to install GNU Linux on the tablet immediately. I thought that I would keep a dual boot capability for a little while just to make sure that I could access the key features of the machine under Linux. But I found found myself in a disagreeable entanglement with Microsoft’s programmer lawyers within the first ten minutes of using the machine. As a result, I deleted Windows XP completely, reformatted the disk and, despite the fact that some features of the laptop are not immediately accessible under Linux, I have no regrets.I’m confident that all of the issues will be resolved in a reasonable amount of time and I’ll post all of the fixes I install on a separate page so other prospective users of the TC4400 can move directly to Linux without hesitating.