Prediction

One of the greatest limitations of our mental lives is that we cannot predict how we are going to feel in 3 minutes let alone in 5 years. We think that we can, but we cannot. We can project, but these projections ignore what unforeseeable events might happen at work, in our relationships or in the world, that affect our own state of mind. Because we cannot predict the environmental circumstances, we cannot predict how we will respond to them. Without a contrary expectation, we assume continuity of our mental states, and this is one of the gravest of all of our faulty assumptions.