Happiness and our future selves

I had picked up Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, from the public library. However, I am reading too many other books at the current time and probably will not read this book now but managed to find an excerpt in the Foreword that I read.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

From the little I read about the book, I learned about the impact bias i.e. "people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it." Here is an interesting wiki entry on various cognitive biases.

You can read the NY Times review of the book or hear the author at TED talk about "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?" (I think I linked to this before.)

Also, every released book seems to have a blog these days.