Dan Gilbert's talk focuses heavily on the focusing illusion whereby people are bad at predicting what makes them happy. He draws a lot on studies such as the Brickman et al (1978) paper thats showed that people who had been rendered paraplegic and people who had won the lotto reverted back to their base level of happiness. His talk reminds me of the "alchemies of the mind" book ive been reading by Elster. Its a good counterbalance to our commonsense notions of happiness being attained through achievement but there a lot of counterpoints to be made such as Sen's ideas about the invalidity of self-reports.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97
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