We are terrible at forecasting how we would think when we get into some kind of situation hypothetically. It is why we can be happier in situations that we think we’d be miserable. Dan Gilbert spoke about this more than 16 years ago.
And part of the reason I think, is that we often associate our identity with just a narrow subset of ourselves such that when things change, we imagine that there’s not much more within our identity to accommodate those events, situations or trauma. Yet our real identity is so much bigger, and so much more. Maya Shankar shares about this a bit more on Brene Brown’s Dare to lead podcast episode.