Summary Of Reporting Live From Tomorrow By Daniel Gilbert

“Reporting Live from Tomorrow” is an essay written by Daniel Gilbert. In his essay, in the beginning of his essay on page 179 he says “if you were to write down everything you know and the go back through the list and make a check mark next to the things you know only because somebody told you [you’d realize that] almost everything you know is secondhand” which is true. Given this information you would expect that we are only making a few poor decisions but that’s not the case. In his article, he claims two things, one we learn a lot from others, and a lot of what we learn is wrong, and second our imagination has many shortcomings. Which is valid because a lot of what we do learn from others is wrong, and other people’s experiences can

lead us to a better outcome of our future than our imagination.
The first thing that probably comes to a lot of people’s mind when they hear someone say that they should learn from other people’s experiences, might be that we all have our own path to follow and our own density. While that is true, some people might be walking down the same path as you, they might be further along. So, it would be smarter to take their experiences into account and you might be able to avoid facing some of the brutal obstacles they faced. This is not to say copy everything that they’ve done, People should just learn from other people’s experiences whether they’ve been good or bad. Daniel Gilbert states that we should use people as “surrogates” for our future because “we don’t have to imagine what it would feel like to marry a lawyer, move to Texas, or eat a snail when there are so many people who have done these things” so we should take advantage of that and learn from that, it would save us a lot of time and even money in some cases.
According to Gilbert a lot of what we learn from other people is wrong and when he presents the evidence he is completely correct. It can be proven that a lot of the things that we learn are second hand from our parents, family members, friends, and in school. But a lot of those second-hand things that we know a lot about have proven to be wrong. An example that Gilbert uses in his essay is having kids, “Every human culture tells its members that having children will make them happy” (184) Especially woman, when imagining our own off spring we imagine the joy they will bring us, how much like us they’ll be, and how we’ll raise them to be wonderful and successful people but that is simply not true. Woman who are the ones who take on all the responsibilities and stress when it comes to a child have been shown to become less happy and it puts stress on that couple’s relationship as well. Couples generally start out their relationships happy and become less satisfied over the course of their lives. Couples only return close to their original happiness when their kids leave home. According to the American Psychological Association “after having a baby, 67 percent of couples see their marital satisfaction plummet, according to research presented at APA's 2011 Annual Convention by John Gottman, PhD, and published in the Journal of Family Psychology (Vol. 14, No. 1).” (Dingfelder, Sadie). The affects that kids have on a couple’s marriage is a glamorize false idea that spreaded throughout every culture. In June, The Journal of Advanced Nursing reported on a study from the University of Nebraska College of Nursing that looked at marital happiness in “185 men and women. Scores declined starting in pregnancy, and remained lower as the children reached 5 months and 24 months. Other studies show that couples with two children score even lower than couples with one child.” This evidence and a lot more factual evidence should be proof to many women who have this glamorized image of have kids, those who had thoughts that it makes you happier, and makes the marriage last, is all incorrect. Children are stressful and can take a toll on your happiness and marriage.
In his essay Gilbert also states that we should use other people who he refers to as “surrogates” as our guideline to predict our future, because just using our imaginations fails us and has failed us because it doesn’t allow us to think about all the possible outcomes.

He correctly states that just using our imagination to predict our future has three specific short comings. The first shortcoming is that the imagination tends to “fill in and leave out without telling us… No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event.” (Gilbert, 188) You are bound to miss out a few or many important details. For example, you might’ve applied for a job and you imagine yourself getting the job, how you’re going to save your money, or how you’re going to spend it. But while your imagination is running wild we often forget to think about other important things like what if you don’t get the job? The second shortcoming is that when our imagination paints a picture of the future it has many gaps and we fill those gaps with details that we borrow from the present. On page 188, Gilbert uses a statement that supports this short coming and something that we all can relate to and confirm to be true. He states “Anyone who has shopped on an empty stomach, vowed to quick smoking after stubbing out a cigarette, or proposed marriage while on shore leave knows that how we feel now can enormously influence how we think we’ll feel later.” Which is so true, when you’re hungry you might imagine how great the food is going to taste or how many plates you’re going to eat but once the event happens the food might not be as great as you imagined and even if it was great you probably won’t eat as much as you thought. The last short coming is the imaginations failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen. The example that gilbert uses to make his point is that “bad things will look a whole lot better … when we imagine losing a job, for instance we imagine the

painful experience” he continues to say that we forget to also imagine “how our psychological immune systems will transform this meaning” we might take it as a sign and realize that this was our chance to quit retail and follow your true callings, whatever it may be. These are all examples to show that the imagination which we often use a lot to predict our future and future feelings is flawed in many ways and many times we forgot to include the most important things. The author presents that the best way we can predict our future or the outcome of a situation is by using people as “surrogates” by looking at someone who has been in the same situation as you are in and seeing what the outcome was and how it made them feel. By doing this people will be able to make a more valid prediction of how the outcome will affect them personally, rather than their imagination.
In all, Gilbert is trying to tell us that we should learn from other people’s mistakes so that we don’t do the same. We should learn from our peers, family members, and parent’s mistakes because it will save people a lot of time and money. Imagine if someone tried to build a machine and the way they built it the first time was incorrect because the machine did not work. Would you then go on to build the same machine the same way? No, because that would be a waste of time. It is the same with your life do not continue to make the same mistakes that many other people have made when it could have been avoidable by just communicating with someone that has built the same machine before.