Stumbling on Happiness [Import] [Hardcover]

Daniel Gilbert (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1ST edition (2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007183127
• ISBN-13: 978-0007183128
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (298 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,773,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel Gilbert is Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. His research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Money, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Self, Men's Health, Redbook, Glamour, Psychology Today, and many others. His short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as other magazines and anthologies. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

836 of 886 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pretty happy read- but not as happy as you think it is going to be, May 6, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Stumbling on Happiness (Hardcover)

Here are some of the most important points of this book:
1) We often exaggerate in imagining the long- term emotional effects certain events will have on us.
2) Most of us tend to have a basic level of happiness which we revert to eventually.
3) People generally err in imagining what will make them happy.
4) People tend to find ways of rationalizing unhappy outcomes so as to make them more acceptable to themselves.
5) People tend to repeat the same errors in imagining what will make them happy.
6) Events and outcomes which we dread may when they come about turn into new opportunities for happiness.
7) Many of the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world- and thus strive to change it.
8) Happiness is rarely as good as we imagine it to be, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will. The same mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness.

Gilbert makes these points and others with much anecdotal evidence and humor.

A pretty happy read, but not as happy as you think it is going to be.

103 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Before you try to get happy, read this to get smart, March 15, 2007

By 

Richard A. Lowe (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stumbling on Happiness (Hardcover)

I love a quote by Dr. Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Prize winning physicist: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool". If you want to be happy, happy with your choices and the outcomes of your efforts you should buy and read this book to at least understand why you are pretty much hard-wired to break Dr. Feynman's first principle while you are trying to do so.

Until recently, when someone asked me "what do you want from life?" I would survey the myriad wishes and desires floating around in my mind and pull out some random musing to do with creating a family or making more money than I knew what to do with. I have certainly worked towards these things and had varying levels of success with love and career and material wealth. But I have always been baffled by why virtually nothing could make me happy in a lasting and predictable way. I am not baffled anymore, even though I am still unhappy in a lot of ways. "Stumbling on Happiness" has educated me to the ways that people exhibit self-delusion when looking forward to predict how happy some future experience will make them happy.

Gilbert is wickedly funny at times as he describes the mechanisms that lead us to distort our thinking; our projections about what will bring about our future selves happiness. This is the kind of information (why we're so deluded) I expected to get from the book. But he goes further and explains how we often don't even know how we feel in a particular moment and how we can have an *experience* of something, without it ever bubbling up into our conscious *awareness*. The onslaught of the information demonstrating the failures of human imagination in achieving contentment is a lot to take in... I felt myself a little depressed at my chances at choosing any future path that was any better than what I'd done up to this point.

But I came to a realization about what I'd learned here: if you are like me and are actively looking to increase your level of happiness, while this book is not directly practical in accomplishing that, it is an essential base upon which to evaluate other materials. Having this book as a counterpoint to other, more practical books (say in the field of Positive Psychology) will increase your chances of not fooling yourself (at least not as badly or for as long). And to be fair, he does offer one suggestion.

I heard about this book listening to an interview with him on the CBC Radio program 'Tapestry'. I highly recommend taking the 24 minutes to listen to that interview (Google: 'tapestry daniel gilbert' to listen online) if you want a preview of the fascinating content of the book.

344 of 366 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting with flaws, June 16, 2006

By 

Stan Vernooy (Henderson, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Stumbling on Happiness (Hardcover)

Like many, many books, this one is better at describing the problem than it is in proposing solutions. Gilbert contends that our powers of predicting what will make us happy in the future are seriously flawed, and then proposes a simple solution which he correctly predicts that no one will use.

His description of the reasons that our predictive powers are flawed is both fascinating and convincing. However, even in this part (which is the bulk of the book), he makes an unspoken (and apparently unrecognized) assumption: That is, he assumes that "real" happiness or unhappiness is defined by the emotional state that a person feels immediately after, or concurrently with, the event in question.

To use an example: a couple of other reviewers have already mentioned Gilbert's story of a victory in an important college football game. Students predict in advance that they will be ecstatic if their team wins, and a different study suggests that a few months after the fact they will contend that they WERE ecstatic. However, close monitoring of their feelings at the actual time of the victory, or shortly thereafter, suggests that they weren't as happy as they expected to be, or as they later recalled being. On a less trivial topic, he makes the same claim regarding the experience of having and raising children: It isn't as much fun as the parents expect it to be. And while the child-rearing was going on, it wasn't as happy an experience as they later remembered it to be. But Gilbert is ignoring a vital point here: The anticipation of happiness, and the recollection of happiness, ARE happiness! Gilbert writes the entire book with the unexamined assumption that happy anticipations and happy memories can be discarded as mere illusions - the fabrications of irrational minds. I think he's wrong.

At the end, Gilbert provides a prescription for making decisions: ask the advice of someone who has chosen each of your alternatives, and see how (s)he likes the results. The suggestion is obviously far too facile, but it does give Gilbert the opportunity to discuss the interesting fact that each of us tends to exaggerate his or her own uniqueness. He's almost certainly right about that, but it isn't enough to rescue his advice. Regardless of what the "average" person thinks, I am certain that watching "American Idol" would be an excruciatingly boring experience for me, and that I would much prefer living in Eugene, Oregon, to living in Las Vegas where I live now (and where tens of thousands of people are flooding in every year, all of them optimistic that they will be happier here than wherever they live now). I don't need to talk to another person to be confident that I would prefer a Whopper to anything served in a Thai restaurant, and that I would rather take a course in classical guitar than art history.

So read this with a skeptical mind. But read it. There's lots of good stuff in it.