Executive Reading

Community Comments

Stumbling on Happiness

By Daniel Gilbert

Alfred A Knopf, ISBN: 1400042666

Reviewed by Margaret Teichert and Oleg Kaganovich

What if Ingrid Bergman had stayed in Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart instead of getting on the plane with her husband? Would she have regretted it, as he so memorably predicted? According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, she probably would have felt just fine — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon — and for the rest of her life.
    Why? In part, according to Gilbert, because most of us have a basic level of happiness that we revert to eventually, whether we get fired or win the lottery. But also because our “psychological immune systems” can more easily process an excess of courage than an excess of cowardice. Gilbert’s studies show that nine out of 10 of us are more likely to regret things we didn’t do (like ask out our high-school crush) than things that we did do (like invest in a failed internet startup). A pioneer in the field of happiness studies, Gilbert explores his various and startling theories on the subject in his captivating new book, “Stumbling on Happiness.”
    The book isn’t so much prescriptive as descriptive; in fact, Gilbert warns in his introduction: “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, 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.”
Instead, Gilbert draws on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to guide us through a series of fascinating, and often troubling, examples of how our minds work and why we so often fail in our pursuit of happiness.
    In particular, Gilbert details the shortcomings of our own imaginations: We are surprisingly bad at imagining how we will think or feel when the future finally comes. And neither our past personal experiences nor cultural wisdom seems to compensate for these failures of imagination as well as we might think. We’re terrible at predicting how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at imagining what will and will not bring us happiness.
    As Gilbert explains it, our brains tend to make certain logic-processing errors that systematically mislead us for various reasons. For one thing, we cannot possibly retain all the information about everything that has ever happened to us. We compress our experiences into a few salient details. When asked to recall those experiences, he says, our imagination fills in missing pieces in ways that are not always accurate. Thus, we tend to overpredict how happy a good event (such as buying a Ferrari) will make us, and for how long, because imagination does not take into account all the other background circumstances that affect our happiness (maintenance costs or speeding tickets).
    Secondly, our imaginations tend to project the present onto the future. For example, it’s easy for someone who has just finished eating her third helping of Thanksgiving turkey to believe she will never be hungry again. Conversely, if someone goes grocery shopping on an empty stomach, he will doubtless overpurchase whatever looks good right then.
    Finally, imagination does not take into account our psychological defense mechanisms that help us cope with negative experiences. When something bad happens to us, we tend to find ways of rationalizing the experience to make it more acceptable. This, as Gilbert explains it, is not so much an act of delusion as of self-preservation: A healthy psyche is one that isn’t defensive or defenseless but is defended.
    Near the end of the book, Gilbert claims that “my friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions.” This is true; however, his insights and examples are worth considering, particularly the thought that we shouldn’t despair at our inability to find lasting happiness. As he points out, the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world — and strive to change it.

• Share
  • Digg This
  • del.icio.us
  • Newsvine
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Furl It
  • !Y My Web
  • Google
• Email
• Print

Recommend This

Community Comments