Full Book Summary of Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Preview

Most of us spend an astonishing amount of time trying to be happy. We choose jobs, lovers, cities, sandwiches, sofas, and weekend plans by asking a quiet question that follows us everywhere. How will this make me feel later? We act as if we are careful fortune tellers of our own emotional future, as if somewhere inside each of us there is a wise little prophet holding charts and maps and weather reports about tomorrow’s joy. But what if that prophet is charming, confident, and wrong a lot of the time? That is the game this book wants to play with you. It is not really a book about happiness in the sugary sense, and it is not a book full of neat commandments about how to live. It is a book about how the mind imagines the future and why it so often gets the future wrong. It asks a beautifully simple question. If we want to be happy, and if our choices are based on what we think will make us happy, then how good are we at predicting what will make us happy? The answer, it turns out, is both funny and unsettling. We are gifted at imagining futures that do not yet exist, but we are not nearly as gifted at imagining how those futures will actually feel once they arrive. Daniel Gilbert takes that ordinary fact and opens it up like a magician showing you the hidden wires under the stage. He explains that the human brain is, among many other things, an anticipation machine. It remembers the past, not merely to honor it, but to use it. It looks ahead, rehearses possibilities, and lets us sample experiences before they happen. That sounds like a marvelous advantage, and it is. Yet the same machinery that...