6. Stumbling on Happiness
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Daniel Gilbert
Genre: Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness
Info: 336 pages, published January 1, 2006
Format: Book
Summary
Gilbert’s central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. He argues that imagination fails in three ways:
(1) Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
(2) Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
(3) Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.
Gilbert then recommends using other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it, since people are very similar in many of their experiences.
Quotes
“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.”
“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”
“Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.”
“In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.”
“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”
“Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!”
“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”
“Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret “not” having done things much more than they regret things they “did”, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.”
“The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.”
“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”