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Stumbling on Happiness

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Overview

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we're so lousy at predicting what will make us happy - and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population ? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new?

Editorial Reviews

Not offering a self-help book, but instead mounting a scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our search for happiness, Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, draws on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to argue that, just as we err in remembering the past, so we err in imagining the future. "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," Gilbert writes, as he reveals how ill-equipped we are to properly preview the future, let alone control it. Unfortunately, he claims, neither personal experience nor cultural wisdom compensates for imagination's shortcomings. In concluding chapters, he discusses the transmission of inaccurate beliefs from one person's mind to another, providing salient examples of universal assumptions about human happiness such as the joys of money and of having children. He concludes with the provocative recommendation that, rather than imagination, we should rely on others as surrogates for our future experience. Gilbert's playful tone and use of commonplace examples render a potentially academic topic accessible and educational, even if his approach is at times overly prescriptive. 150,000 announced first printing. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Daniel Gilbert

Dan Gilbert is the creator and developer of the Atlas addon for World of Warcraft. He also maintains atlasmod.com and the forums there, and encourages you to stop by and say hi.When he actually has time to play WoW, you can find him on the Jaedenar server as Razark (his Shaman) or Nine (his Mage). Dan also sometimes works as a web developer, a graphic artist, and a cinematographer. He designs T-shirts at threadless.com, where his designs "I Heart Color" and "Release" have been printed. Dan recently graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA where he studied film production. For his thesis project (or Div III) he created a film called The Nightingale Princess with his co-conspirators, Christopher Dreisbach and Owen Granich-Young. The three of them have websites at thenightingaleprincess.com and ocdproductions.net. So far the movie hasn't gotten into any festivals, but Dan has his fingers crossed. He currently lives in Northampton, MA. In his spare time, he enjoys sleeping.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

1.33 MB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780307265302

Excerpt from: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

CHAPTER 1
Journey to Elsewhen
O, that a man might know The end of this day's business ere it come!
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

PRIESTS VOW TO REMAIN CELIBATE, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: "The human being is the only animal that . . ." We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence. We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with "can use language" were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with "uses tools." So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I'd like to do so now, with you as my witness. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Now, let me say up front that I've had cats, I've had dogs, I've had gerbils, mice, goldfish, and crabs (no, not that kind), and I do recognize that nonhuman animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference. For example, I live in an urban neighborhood, and every autumn the squirrels in my yard (which is approximately the size of two squirrels) act as though they know that they will be unable to eat later unless they bury some food now. My city has a relatively well-educated citizenry, but as far as anyone can tell its squirrels are not particularly distinguished. Rather, they have regular squirrel brains that run food-burying programs when the amount of sunlight that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening contemplation of tomorrow, and the squirrel that stashes a nut in my yard "knows" about the future in approximately the same way that a falling rock "knows" about the law of gravity?which is to say, not really. Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer vacation, or turns down a Fudgsicle because it already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.