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Stumbling on Happiness Paperback – March 20, 2007

by Daniel Gilbert (Author)

545 customer reviews

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• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink?• Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? • Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it?In this brilliant, witty, and accessible book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. Vividly bringing to life the latest scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. With penetrating insight and sparkling prose, Gilbert explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.

Stumbling on Happiness

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Product Details

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage (March 20, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400077427
ISBN-13: 978-1400077427
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (545 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Books > Business & Money > Marketing & Sales > Consumer Behavior
- #46 in Books > Science & Math > Behavioral Sciences > Cognitive Psychology
- #79 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Happiness

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Before you try to get happy, read this to get smart

ByRichard Loweon March 15, 2007

Format: 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.

44 comments 315 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

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

ByShalom FreedmanHALL OF FAMEon May 6, 2006

Format: 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.

1717 comments 1,080 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Interesting with flaws

ByStan Vernooyon June 16, 2006

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

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.

2222 comments 508 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Stumbling on subjective illusions

This book is essential for those people who may be having a difficult time understanding why the traditional paths, laid out by family, friends and society; are not leading them...Read more

Published 5 days ago by J

Entertaining, Educational and LOL Funny

If you want to stumble on happiness start doing good deeds and random acts of kindness. Writing in a gratitude journal also seems to work as does changing your thoughts from...Read more

Published 8 days ago by Rebecca of Amazon

The book verbalize what we generally sense but fail to grasp. Very insightful that helps cultivate awareness and hopefully with this precious understanding about ourselves, we can...Read more

Published 14 days ago by Jinn Tran

Invaluable... witty and understandable.

Invaluable...witty and understandable. He is the Carl Sagan of psychology

Published 18 days ago by Lawrence A. Sherwin

This is an amazing book that I recommend to everyone. It really removes the mystery about what happiness is.

Published 28 days ago by Baha Suleiman

Really excellent book. Dan Gilbert does a great job of ...

Really excellent book. Dan Gilbert does a great job of incorporating mindfulness practice into the idea of "happiness". Definitely worth a read.

Published 1 month ago by KDuq

Fast shipping and good quality book!

Published 1 month ago by Amazon Customer

Recommended by a friend. It had some good thoughts.

Published 1 month ago by K Charboneau

NOT a self-help book thankfully

Delightfully written, quick, interesting survey of our conceptual biases, particularly how & why we are such poor predictors of our own future responses to hypothetical...Read more

Published 1 month ago by White Rabbit

A very good read

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The author's style is catchy yet informative and the message finds its way through examples, scientific evidence and experments.Read more

Published 1 month ago by Kostas Vergidis

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