Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Stumbling on Happiness - Think You Know What Makes you Happy? - Daniel Gilbert, Knopf (May 2, 2006), ISBN:1400042666
Most people think they know what makes them happy. But Daniel Gilbert suggests they don't. He suggests that the limitations of our imaginations are getting in the way of understanding happiness. The author presents many ways for us to begin stumbling on happiness. He makes psychological concepts come alive with a charming and amusing manner. Most importantly, he makes even the most complicated ideas easy to understand.
Stumbling on Happiness suggests that what distinguishes us from other animals is our ability to predict the future. But we are really bad at it. We do not know how we will feel tomorrow, or next year. We are even worse at knowing what will bring us happiness.
Daniel Gilbert suggests this lack of predictive ability is a shortcoming of our imaginations. Moreover, we are not good at using personal experiences to correct these errors.
This is not just a self-help book, but a fully scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination. Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard, and draws on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and economics to advance his arguments. "Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable," he writes.
Dan Gilbert's research area is "affective forecasting", which investigates how well people make predictions about the emotional impact of future events. This research provides the focus and depth in the book. It also makes it one of the best recent books on scientific self help. If you can learn to predict what will make you happier then what better help could your self have?
An it is not just individual psychology that is faulty. Inaccurate beliefs about the causes of happiness are commonplace in today's society, and are continually being transmitted from one person's mind to another. False cognitions, about things like the joys of money and of having children, are causing great unhappiness.
Instead of imagination, we should rely on others as surrogates for our future experience.
Quotes from Stumbling on Happiness
"What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today."
"If the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking."
"... this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you've bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why."
The Science of Happiness
In this book, Gilbert stresses that happiness is a science. It is extremely important to realise that the study of emotions is as much a science as atomic physics--then progress can be made.
"When people think of 'science', they naturally think of atoms, planets, robots — things they can touch and see. They know that subjective experiences such as happiness are important, but they believe that such experiences can't be studied scientifically. That belief is dead wrong." - Daniel Gilbert.
People can reliably report on their emotional experience, therefore a science of happiness is possible. If you do not believe that subjective experience can be science, then you have to accept optometry is magic
Physics really got going when Newton's law of gravitation provided one reason for objects moving in the way they do. It replaced several muddled ideas about how and why objects move in different circumstances. Gilbert is attempting this for happiness.
Professor Gilbert states that (i) people think there are more important things than happiness and (ii) there are different kinds of happiness. He suggests they are wrong on both counts. Saving orphans gives the same kind of happiness as saving money. Of course, these pleasures differ in other dimensions, and in the amount of happiness generated; but "feeling good" is the same--whatever makes you feel good. This is a universal law could have as many ramifications as Newton's.
Comments on the book
"This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it." - Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.
"Think you know what makes you happy? This absolutely fantastic book will shatter your most deeply held convictions about how your mind works." - Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakanomics.
