Over the past few weeks, I have been reading about grief and loss, and the dying process as part of my internship experience. This has been useful as far as gaining empathy for families who are in these situations, and building a depth of knowledge regarding different experiences individuals may have with grief. While I am reading about death and grief, I keep encountering themes around the importance of love, life, family, and acceptance. If someone has not had the experience of being with a loved one at the end of life, this may seem contradictory. However, being with someone at the end of life, may end up finally teaching us the lessons we need to fully appreciate our lives going forward. This has certainly been the case in my personal life, and I continue to find more appreciation in life as I progress through my internship at Hospice. Which led me to explore a topic around how humans appreciate life and what makes human beings “happy”? How do we know the choices we are making will be worth it? How do we go about making significant choices? In this search, I came across a book called, Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. The book sounded a bit simplistic, yet Dr. Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist and spoke at the APA convention in 2010 regarding his research on happiness. One of the main themes is how humans spend a significant portion of their life living in the future. We are constantly planning ahead, hoping our hard work pays off, hoping retirement is relaxing, even though we are stressed out at our current jobs…. whatever the situation is in our particular lives. Ultimately however our brains are not able to predict who our future selves will be, and if we will appreciate the choices that our past selves made, or resent those choices, in a similar way to how children may grow up and resent the parents who tried their best, but ultimately did not provide what the child decided was important as an adult. Through various research scenarios Dr. Gilbert explores how and why our brains are not accurate historians, and how comparing to the past causes problems when we use our past experience to make inferences regarding what our future wants, desires, and needs will be. Therefore the bottom line of his suggestion is if we want to know and understand what it is feel like to have a different job, live in a different place, raise a child, whatever the experience is, our best source and most honest source of information is to ask someone who is currently having this experience, and not to rely on our past memory, or other people’s historical memory, when making decisions about our futures. This is a TED Net Talk featuring Dr. Gilbert- http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html