Reading this newsletter last week  Happiness is a 2×2 Matrix I came across this video Interview with Hillel Einhorn
on happiness.   “Now, there are some interesting issues there about looking for evidence opposed, or evidence about non-occurrences. This was brought home to me dramatically in a Chinese restaurant one night after the meal. They brought the usual fortune cookies and I opened the cookie and read my fortune. It was a very interesting one. It said, ‘Don’t think about all of the things that you want that you don’t have, think of all of the things that you don’t want that you don’t have.'”

The speaker continued, “Well, that kind of stopped me dead. I don’t know who writes these things, but this is a very interesting one. So I immediately drew a two-by-two table – ‘want’, ‘not want’, ‘have’, ‘not have’. Of course, we think about what we want that we have, what we want that we don’t have, what we don’t want that we have. But rarely do we ever think about what we don’t want and what we don’t have. So, I like to use this example to point out that if the correlation between ‘wants’ and ‘haves’ is some notion of happiness, and because that ‘don’t want, don’t have’ cell is so large, we’re actually a lot happier than we think we are.”