Stumbling on Happiness
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
What makes humans different from animals is that we think about the future.
There are lots of biases with how we imagine the future related to how we remember and interpret experiences inaccurately.
In turn, this makes it very difficulty to predict what makes us happy despite us feeling like we truly know.
🎨 Impressions
Malcolm Gladwell described the book as a "psychological detective story" which was how it felt. There was a strong, ground-up built idea about how humans desperately want to, but struggle to, predict what they want in the future. Through facts and theories from psychology, cognitive neuro-science, philosophy and behavioural economics, the ideas unravel and come together in a concise conclusion which embeds all the key messages.
How I Discovered It
Gilbert describes this book as what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future and about how well it can predict the future it will most enjoy. This isn't about how to be happy but more the inner workings of the brain explaining why we don't really know what makes us happy.
Who Should Read It?
Anyone interested in reading about happiness, in particular if you have read other books on the subject but want a more scientific, objective approach then the usual positive thinking ideas.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
We tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times not the most likely of times.
The pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of desire.
They only think they’re happy because they don’t know what they are missing. That’s actually the point. Not knowing what we are missing is the very thing that allows us to be happy despite not having some other opportunity.
📒 Summary + Notes
Our Future Self
Humans can think about the future. We understand the concept of 'later.'
Shouldn't we know the tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year.
But we end up with attics full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that our future self considers painful, embarrassing or useless. Our future self criticises our choices of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement and pay good money to remove the tattoos they once paid good money to get. Why do our future self experience regret and relief instead of price and appreciation. We might understand has we neglected or ignored our future self. But we gave them the best years of our life.
The mistakes we make when we try imagine our personal future are lawful, regular and systematic. They have patterns that tell us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.
We Want to Control Our Futures
Exercising control is a natural want. We enjoy being effective, changing things, influencing, making things happen. Lots of our behaviour from infancy onwards is an expression of this penchant for control. People feel more certain about winning the lottery if they can choose the numbers and are more confident they will win a dice toss if they throw the dice. We don't like to watch a live football game the next day, as it has happened and we feel our chanting in front of the TV won't help.
Therefore controlling our futures makes us feel good.
We are apes that learned to look forwards because doing so enables us to shop among many fates that might befall us. We can then select the best one. Other animals must experience the pain or pleasure but our powers of foresights allow us to imagine an experience that which has not happened. We know abandonment, scorn, eviction, demotion, disease and divorce are undesirable ends we should do our best to avoid. Therefore some futures are better than others, and even from a distance we should be able to tell which. But we are much worse at this then we think.
3 Issues With Our Imagination
It has a tendency to fill in and leave out bits without telling us. No-one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, but we miss out some important ones. When we imagine the distant future, we tend to imagine things in generalities and gloss over the details. When we imagine things in the near future (like tomorrow), we tend to think in concrete details. Our brains “fill in” all sorts of information each day. Our predictions are influenced by our experiences. We make assumptions about things that we predict based on the previous experiences we have had or heard about before.
It has a tendency to project the present onto the future. When imagination paints a picture of the future, many details are missing and it solves the problem by filling in the gaps with the present. Everyone tends to use the present as a way to imagine the future and influence memories of the past. Thus, our memories and imaginations are often closer to our current reality than actual reality.
It fails to recognise that things will look different once they happen. That bad things will look a whole lot better as our physiological immune system will give it new meaning (losing your job was an opportunity to follow your true calling). Most people overestimate how terrible traumatic events will actually be. For example, quadriplegics and earthquake victims generally rate themselves as much happier than people would ever imagine.
Sharing Experience and Society
One of the benefits, of being a social and linguistic animal is we can capitalise on the experience of others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves. However, we often overestimate our uniqueness, and tell ourselves we are doing something for unique reasons.
The production of wealth, does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the need of an economy, which serves the need of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional believes about happiness and wealth.
Remembering Incorrectly
We tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times.
The theories that lead us to predict than event will make us happy, also lead us to remember that it did. This eliminates evidence of our own inaccuracy. We overestimate how happy we will be on our birthdays and underestimate how happy we will be on Monday mornings. We makes these mundane, erroneous predicts again and again despite these regular disconfirmations. Our inability to recall exactly how we felt is one of the reasons why our wealth of experience puts us in a no better position. When we can’t change our experience, we start to look for ways to change our view of the experience.
Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moment and theories about how we must have felt way back then, all of which gravely compromise our inability to learn from our own experience.
We explain the situation away. But, explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them. And we're more likely to look for and find a positive view of things we are stuck with than of the things we are not.
Final Points:
Our brains are wired to make decisions that don’t actually favour us in the modern world. We convince ourselves of mis-realities and subconsciously use explanations to change the narrative.
Considering and reflecting on how our brains manipulate both our past and future to such an extent is mind-blowing. When we understand the biases at play we can strive to make better decisions about our future and life.
