Stumbling on Happiness

I heard about this book on the Freakonomics podcast and was instantly intrigued. This is not a self-help book on how to be happy - it’s a rigorous scientific examination of why we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. And it’s extremely thought-provoking!

Gilbert is a fast talker, but otherwise he does an excellent job with the audio narration. He presents compelling evidence to support his ideas, and I was totally with him, point for point, until the very end, when he tries to argue that the drive to accumulate wealth and have kids is a sort of self-propagating social conspiracy basically unrelated to personal happiness. I couldn’t really get on board with that, but it’s a side argument that’s not show more critical to the main idea.

But whether you buy all of Gilbert’s arguments or not, Stumbling on Happiness is still a really interesting read, and I guarantee that you will find something in it that relates to your own experiences in some way. It’s not a long book, but it’s dense with ideas. Humor interspersed throughout keeps it from getting dry. Overall, this is a fascinating listen that I’m very glad I came across and will definitely be chewing over for a while. show less

How can you predict how happy you'll be doing something in the future? Ask someone else who is doing that same thing NOW!

Why? Daniel Gilbert explains with wit and humor that psychological studies, observations and experiments show how poorly we remember our emotional states of the past, and how that and our present states color - usually "wrongly" - our imagination/simulations of our future states.

And yet, evolution selected for these seemingly conflicting traits for the benefit of us and the others: If one weren't somewhat deluded into imagining the future could not be better than the present, then one might be content to just remain status quo, and not working for the advancement of society in general.

Read about this and more in show more Gilbert's wonderful book!

Do note, however, that this is not so much a book that gives prescription for happiness, but rather explains the stumbling blocks that cause us to mis-estimate our happiness. It would seem that other than attempting to gauge future levels of happiness by querying others in the present, that we are always bound (by evolutionary wiring) to otherwise not predict or remember well, and it is difficult or impossible to get around such. Again, that is not necessarily such a bad thing; after all, evolution selected for this. show less

Every psychologist vows to one day complete the sentence, “The human being is the only animal that . . .”

Most wait until late in their careers to complete the sentence. They know, intuitively, the worse they do, the better they will be remembered. In this book, Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard College argues “The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.”

In a witty, well-written and insightful fashion, he uses the latest research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to illustrate our ability to imagine the future and our capacity to predict whether we will like it when we arrive there.

Foresight is a fragile commodity. Happiness is not found using a simple show more formula. In answering “the question,” Gilbert entertains while he illuminates many of the reasons why we stumble in our visions of the future. The subject is not new, but Gilbert’s treatment is novel, perceptive and amusing.

Penned by the Pointed Pundit
December 9, 2006
12:04:35 PM show less

A fascinating tour around the inside of your very own skull.

Wow things make a lot more sense now I have read this. It is yet to be seen if knowing this stuff will mean I change anything, according to the book itself probably not, but I think knowing how your own mind works does help you cope with it better when it is mis-behaving.

Lots of anecdotes to illustrate his points which actually turn out to be scientific studies, so you get the entertainment and the facts in one go.

Written like he is whispering into your ear. No he isn't point scoring he is just as human/bad/good at this stuff as the rest of us.

A good suggestion for any misanthropists out there.

A clear solution to feeling happy whihc of course no one will ever take any heed show more of.

Entertaining, enlightening and full of "Hey listen to this . . . " moments.

He is now on my reading list. show less

This is one of the better of the current glut of positive psychology books. This book is high quality because Gilbert does not focus on happiness. He rarely talks about happiness directly. He focuses on cognitive tendencies of human beings and their effects on how people interpret how they feel, remember how they felt, and anticipate how they will feel.

One cognitive trick that reoccurs throughout the book is that the brain summarizes. Memories of the past are not faithful recordings of the events but reconstructions based on a few key points. Observations of the present only gather a small part of the information around. (Side note: it is my opinion that this is why the faddish "law of attraction" seems to work. Focusing on a desire show more does not change the world, but it does change your perception of the world.)

Summarizing also applies to images of the future (although the exact word choice becomes a little odd). One's predictions tend to focus on a few key points and ignore everything else. For example, most people would feel that they will have a strong and long lasting reaction to the outcome of the next presidential election. Often, people are right about the strength of their reaction, but they are very wrong about the duration. This mistake occurs because predictions of the future leave out the details about the rest of life that tend to very quickly temper your emotions (whether your candidate wins or loses, you will still, for example, have to walk in the rain and will still get to go out to a nice dinner).

That is not all there is to this. Although people tend to over estimate their future happiness or unhappiness, the strength of their anticipation tends to color how they remember an event. Thus, if you think you will feel some amount of happiness from event and you actually feel some different amount, the amount of happiness you remember feeling will be somewhere between the two.

Gilbert does not give happiness tips, but I will take a stab at using his observations to analyze some common happiness tips. Consider the following (seemingly inconsistent) tips: live in the moment, look forward to the future, do not worry too much about the future, do not dwell on the past, cherish your happy memories. If you compare these tips with what we know about the mind, you can start to see why they all can help. Focusing on the moment raises the happiness you actually experience. Anticipation raises the happiness you will remember having experienced. Remembering past experiences provides material for your mind to use when it is making predictions about the future, so focusing on the happy memories will help you to anticipate that similar future events will bring happiness.

This book does not pretend to have all the answers. Instead, it focuses on helping you to understand how the human mind works. With these tools, you can begin to understand why certain bits of common wisdom on happiness work and why they sometimes fail. And, if you are like me, just knowing that makes you a little bit happier. show less

I literally stumbled on this book whilst browsing the library shelf and happily so! It may sound like a self-help book but thats precisely what its not.. its a primer on the quest for happiness with a mix of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy & behavioral economics.
Written in a tongue-in-cheek humorous style, from the filling-in & leaving-out tricks that our brain plays to the liberties that imagination takes without telling us about doing so.. its a mind-boggling start to the book! The author then goes on to describe how imagination leans on perception, given its own limitation to transcend boundaries of the present time, place & circumstances - what we imagine as the future is often a response to what's happening in the present; our show more present thoughts & feelings exert a strong influence on the way we think we'll feel later.
It gets further complicated when our brain gets busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it - we build a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in the same way that the physical immune system defends the body. To ensure our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eyes see and to ensure our views are positive, our eyes look for what our brain wants; conspiring against us in a secretive way! We are more likely to generate a positive & credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cant escape than of one we can and yet we choose the former coz we pay more attn to favorable information, surround ourselves with those who provide it and accept it uncritically.
Our memory does not serve us too well too - its less like a collection of photographs than it is like a collection of impressionist paintings by an artist who takes license with his subject and emotional experience of happiness is probably the most ambiguous of subjects. Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moments & theories of how we may have felt in past - compromising our ability to learn from personal experience.
Then what is it that still makes us lean on our own selves as the experiencer to gauge our future happiness - the self considers itself to be a very special/ unique person (psst.. ego!) for 3 reasons: a. even if we aren't special, the way we know ourselves is - we experience our own thoughts but infer those of others b. we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special and c. we overestimate everyone's uniqueness, thinking of people as more different from one another than they actually are.
Because of all the reasons above, the author goes on to offer the final solution to getting a real sense of happiness with a certain planned action - relying on the experience of an average individual going thru the same experience currently rather than imagining ourselves in the scenario. Its the surest way to get a real sense of how it would be to stumble upon happiness when undertaking that action! show less

A funny introduction to the strange apparatus we all carry in our head. In his efforts to entertain, the author excels in presenting weird family examples as well as a plethora of psychology experiments. The overall effect, however, is shallow - just like fast food, its nurture value is low. I often wished to find pointers to other books but only got the author's assurances and jokes. I find reading "Influence", a similar book also written by a psychology professor, more stimulating.