Article:The Futile Pursuit of Happiness

      After reading the article The Futile Pursuit of Happiness by Jon Gertner I discovered differences in the way people react to certain events that occur throughout their lives. One of the main idea's that I got out of the article was that our mind creates a sort of safety blanket in response to negative life changing events, but in response to less intense situations we take on a larger reaction because our mind doesn't sense the need to shelter our fall in those situations. Another idea that stood out to me was when Jon described that the way in which people forecast mistakes to happen throughout their lives, being not nearly as life changing as we would predict.
      Jon Gertner's attitude on how we think the length or degree of happiness will last was a very interesting subject to come upon. It goes on to say that how we predict something will "give" us a certain amount of happiness, is not nearly as great and enduring as imagined or predicted. Jon describes that happiness can increase but once its reached its satisfying state, it will go back to its original state of happiness  until something comes along to create another peak of happiness.