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Stumbling on Happiness Summary
About Stumbling on Happiness Book
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? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off?
Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.
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How We Think About The Future
- Thinking about the future is pleasurable and sometimes we’d rather just think about it than get there. Some events are more pleasurable to imagine than to experience.
- We like to daydream because the mere dream itself can be a joy.
- The main reason why our brains simulate the future is so that we can control the experiences that we have.
- Our brain makes predictions incredibly quickly and about nearly everything in life. When our experiences don't match what our brain expects, we feel surprised.
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Our Ability To Imagine
The greatest ability of the human brain is to imagine, to see the world as it has never been before.
But imagination has three shortcomings:
- Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
- Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
- 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.
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About Happiness
The word happiness is used to refer to three related things:
- Emotional happiness
- Moral happiness
- Judgemental happiness
It’s hard to define emotional happiness, but when we feel it, we have no doubt about its reality and importance. Because we have a poor recollection of our experiences, we cannot objectively compare a previous state of happiness to a present state.
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Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy….
The Joy Of Next
- The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.
- Our brains were made for nexting, and that’s just what they’ll do.
- Happiness is a word that we use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it.
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“Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.”
DANIEL GILBERT
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First Shortcoming Of Imagination
“Imagination’s tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us.”
- No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important.
- Our experience is compressed as a summary phrase (“Dinner was disappointing”) or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter) in memory.
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Your purpose can evolve with you if you allow yourself to believe you are always evolving and capable of way more than you ever imagined.
You try to make your future self happy. But, the problem is, you can only use the knowledge of current you to make decisions for your future self. Your future self might have different tastes, beliefs, and interests.
You’re always going to be playing a bit of a guessing game and you’re never going to know for sure whether or not you’ve found your purpose. But that doesn’t matter. You don’t need to find your perfect purpose. Your purpose can evolve with you.
DANIEL GILBERT
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Finding Purpose
You’re never going to find any level of purpose by sitting there and thinking about it. The jury is out. You find purpose through your actions. It unfolds as you stop taking a passive role in your life.
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What happens if I pursue the wrong path?
stop worrying about this idea that you’re going to “waste time” by pursuing the wrong path. You’re already doing nothing by staying suck in the same spot
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perceptions are merely points of view.
What Is Reality Afterall?
our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality.
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