Book

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert - What appears to be a self-help book is really a book on how our brain wiring affects our memories and how we remember (in reverse) what we want to happen to us down the road. Much like the way the wiring of our eyes and visual processing results in optical illusions, the way our memories work (for example, leaving a lot out and not noticing, or later on making things up to fill in the gaps) causes our expectations and plans to veer far off course when the same mechanisms are used to plan our futures. How we think we will feel in the future, depending on various butterflies flapping and so forth, is often wrong.

The upshot is that we fool ourselves consistently, even if we know about the lies. Because we are good liars. So - do you want to avoid the Charlie Brown reenactment? Read the book.

PS, I don't agree with a lot of Mr. Gilbert's world view, which I think tilts towards the materialistic (in the philosophical sense), but that's more of a question of destination and this is about locomotion.