Book Review: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

I don't know how else to describe it, other than to say that Stumbling on Happiness blew my mind. The book, published by Vintage Canada, is Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's look at the "only animal that thinks about the future" and how that unique talent can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to finding happiness. He starts by dismissing the simplistic idea that we should live as though we might die tomorrow, as though this kind of short-term thinking might unlock the secrets of happiness.

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become.

And what we hope for is that those people will be happy. The problem is that we suck at predicting what it is that will bring happiness to that yet-to-be self. In an attempt to answer that question, Gilbert darts from the familiar subjects of first-year psych (optical illusions, Phineas Gage) to a series of experiments involving memory and prospection. In the process, Gilbert makes it clear that our brains — our greatest resource, the things that makes us us — seem to be determined to keep the future something amorphous and unpredictable, no matter how hard we try.

Gilbert's style is incredibly engaging (and did, in fact, remind me very much of my own "Intro Psychology" prof's style). His examples are interesting on their own, as illuminating trivia about the science of the human condition, but Gilbert successfully brings them together, step by step, to reach an answer to the question at the core of the book: Why aren't we better at making ourselves happy?

We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the lasts ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't. Why don't we learn to avoid these mistakes in the same way that we learn to avoid warm diapers? If practice and coaching can teach us to keep our pants dry, then why can't they teach us to predict our emotional futures?

According to Gilbert, it turns out the problem with imagining the future is that the past and present get in the way. Our memories, he explains, are more like impressionist paintings than photographs of the events of yore. And our imaginations are incapable of conjuring up a future that isn't seen through the tinted glasses of today.

The more ambiguous the subject is, the more license the artist takes, and few subjects are more ambiguous than emotional experience. Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by influenced by unusual instances, closing moments, and theories about how we must have felt way back then, all of which gravely compromise our ability to learn from our own experience. Practice, it seems, doesn't always make perfect.

Gilbert's book is not a self-help book, so there are no solutions offered up to readers desperate to ensure that they are making the best choices for their future selves. (Then again, the book points out that our future selves will probably make the most of whatever they have, so it may not matter how we get there as much as we think it does.) Instead, he has created a book that will change the way you look at yourself and others. It doesn't hurt that the book is as funny and fascinating as it is illuminating. But best of all? It left me happier for having read it.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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