This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
In his great novel, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy spends hundreds of pages describing
Count Vronsky's desperate longing to be with Anna, the woman he loves.
He risks his reputation, his military career, his standing in society.
He endures uncertainty, jealousy, torment.
And finally, after all the struggle and sacrifice, he gets what he wants.
Anna is his.
Almost immediately, something strange happens.
The feeling he imagined would satisfy him forever begins to fade.
Tolstoy writes, In spite of the complete fulfillment of what he had so long desired, he was not completely happy.
He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated.
That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining
that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.
Many of us make what Tolstoy called the eternal error.
We assume that external circumstances, a better job, more money, the right relationship, will finally make us happy.
Or we blame our unhappiness on what's happening around us and the people in our lives.
But psychologists increasingly believe that the greatest obstacles to happiness are not in external events
or the people we encounter.
The barriers to happiness lie within us.