Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come down.

例如，有人以为人是可以干预幸福感的，只要选准了正确的人生目标，就能做到这一点。可是各种有关的研究文献都表明，这是完全做不到的，反而表明（一种近乎残酷的现实）：幸福感上去多少，就得回落多少。