A while back I read Dan Gilbert’s delightful book, Stumbling Upon Happiness. In it, he explains that one reason people are horrible at estimating their future happiness is because they “fill in the gaps of the future” with the present. To explain, he uses a picture similar to the one to the right and notes that while futurists did their best to describe what the future of the kitchen might look like … they utterly missed the whole cultural revolution. (To wit: Few women now wear dresses and cook in the kitchen.) In other words, they simply projected the ideals of the 1950’s into the year 2000.
It is an easy mistake to make when thinking about the future. If you want to avoid it, it helps to listen to the fringe and get impractical.
