Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
722 of 770 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
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
260 of 274 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting with flaws, June 16, 2006
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
102 of 105 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Incomplete Hypotheticals, August 12, 2006
This book is entertaining, highly readable, and ultimately extremely frustrating. Gilbert summarizes scores of psychological and sociological studies on "happiness," and concludes that we humans are spectacularly bad at predicting what will make us happy. But the evidence he relies on seems, for the most part, one-dimensional and even trite, and his unquestioning reliance on this research makes his own theory of happiness seem shallow.
The biggest problem is his failure to address what he or the research subjects mean by "happiness." The same word is used throughout the book to refer to, say, the momentary pleasure one gets from a bite of ice cream, as well as to a more profound and lasting sense of contentment and meaning over time.
Although he acknowleges the definitional problem in the first chapter, he fails to conduct any systematic inquiry into what research subjects might mean when they say they are "happy" in response to a particular research question. It seems obvious subjects might apply a different definition of happiness when asked to predict their future happiness level than when asked to rate their mood at a particular moment in time. Gilbert's failure to consider this possibility -- or to explain how the research controls for it -- undermines the overall persuasiveness of his argument, and leads one to suspect many of his conclusions would be contradicted by more precisely tailored research (or a more rigorous analysis of the results).
For example, Gilbert says that while most prospective mothers predict that having children will enhance their happiness, the research shows that those predictions are wrong. He reaches this conclusion by relying on studies in which mothers were asked how they were feeling at particular moments throughout the day. The responses indicated, for the most part, that the mothers were "less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping or watching television." These studies, he claims, show not only that prospective mothers are wrong when they predict that having children will increase their happiness, but also belie the mothers' claims later in life that having children made them happy.
One problem with this is, of course, that he never tells us what he or the research subjects mean by "happiness." In the particular example described above, I strongly suspect that if the subjects were given a chance to fully articulate their feelings, their predictions would be fairly close to reality. Most would-be parents would probably say they expect that having children will add depth and meaning to their lives, and will give rise both to moments of great joy and to hours of tedium and frustration. This prediction, for the most part, will probably turn out to be true. Moreover, most people with this belief would probably answer "yes" to a survey question asking whether they believed that having children would increase their happiness. But these very same people, when asked how they felt at a particular moment, might well respond "frustrated," "bored," "overwhelmed," or even "miserable" -- especially if the question were asked at the end of a long afternoon with a cranky toddler. Gilbert does not seem to consider that short-term displeasure can be entirely consistent with long-term satisfaction -- or that a meaning and satisfaction -- and ultimately happiness -- often emerge directly from -- not despite of -- a struggle.
To give another example, Gilbert says that most people would probably predict that being jilted at the altar would cause them tremendous unhappiness, but that most people who actually have been jilted probably think that it was "the best thing that ever happened to them." In truth, the actual experience is probably both of those things, and if allowed to elaborate on their feelings, most people would probably imagine they would feel close to how they would actually feel. The feelings would probably be something along the following lines: "it was a tremendously humiliating experience that caused me great embarassment and pain, and in fact, still causes me great embarassment and pain, but ultimately I'm glad I discovered what a selfish jerk my fiance was before I married him." Such a bride might accurately state that being jilted at the altar was the best and worst thing that ever happened to her.
Gilbert does not seem to acknowledge that such apparently contradictory responses can, in fact, be entirely consistent. The most painful experiences might ultimately have the most meaning precisely because of their intensity, and an experience that is accurately predicted to cause great suffering might utlimately become a catalyst for positive change. To put it more bluntly, the cancer that caused a shift in your world view might be the best thing that ever happened to you, but you might lay down your own life before you would allow such suffering to be inflicted on the ones you love. The apparent contradictions between predicted and actual feelings that are the focus of Gilbert's book may well reflect more the inadequacies of social science surveys than any deep-seated delusions about what ultimately will give us a sense of meaning, satisfaction and contentment in our lives.
All and all, this is a book with a lot of fun vignettes, but without the depth that would make this a truly satisfying read.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Barry Schwartz
by Darrin M. McMahon
by Ed Diener
