Overview
Book Title: Stumbling on Happiness
Author: Daniel Gilbert
Year: 2006
Cameron’s Rating: 9/10
My Thoughts & Key Takeaways
The thing that’s great about Stumbling on Happiness is it’s not just a rehashing of advice you’ve heard a thousand times already. There’s a lot of unique concepts here that you’ve probably never thought of:
1. Our ability to imagine the future is dependent on our present state. In other words, our current emotions and circumstances can influence our brain’s projection of what the future will look like.
2. Our brain excels at imagining what the future may hold, but it has a tendency to overlook what the future may lack. This leads to a blind spot in our understanding of future events and how they will actually make us feel.
3. What were once wonderful experiences can become dull after we repeat them many times. The key to maintaining the wonderfulness and impact of experiences is to either introduce variety or distribute the occurrences of these experiences further apart.
4. Confirmation bias plays a role in our beliefs and decision-making. When faced with facts that challenge our favored conclusions, we tend to scrutinize them more carefully and require more evidence to change our beliefs.
5. Our brain can deceive us through delusion, unconsciously creating comfortable beliefs and distorting facts, making introspection challenging.
6. Believing that suffering has meaning or value can actually reduce the perceived pain experienced, as demonstrated by experiments with electric shocks.
7. People generally have an inflated self-perception, seeing themselves as more intelligent, competent, and less biased than average.
As you can see, there’s a lot to wrestle with here. There’s a good chance your prediction of what will make future you happy isn’t entirely accurate. What makes you happy now, may feel monotonous in the future if you experience too much of it.
This is why you may imagine yourself being happy forever once you achieve a specific goal or reach a certain stage in life, but you later come to find out that not to be the case.
You simply can’t expect getting somewhere or achieving something to be your sole source of long-term happiness.
Achieving financial independence or marrying the partner of your dreams may be enough to be your sole source of happiness for a brief period.
These types of milestones can even provide lasting foundations for our well-being, but they alone are not enough.
Sustained happiness will require additional achievements and novel experiences. But, it will also require us to be mindful about how the absence of certain things may make us feel.
My Notes
– As humans evolved and their brain more than doubled in size, the frontal lobe grew disproportionately in comparison to other parts of the brain.
– The frontal lobe was eventually discovered to be the part of the brain that is critical for planning and projecting ourselves into the future.
– Elderly people that are put in a high control environment where they can request the time visitors come rather than being assigned times, or who are responsible for watering plants rather than having staff water plants experience significantly better health outcomes.
– Our memory as well as our ability to simulate the future are state dependent. Because our imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, we often think inaccurately about the future. We imagine that how we think about the future is how we’ll feel when we actually get there, but it’s more often accurate to say that what we feel when we think about the future is a response to what is happening the present.
– Things that are wonderful often see their wonderfulness wane with repetition. The two antidotes to this are time and variety. If you have one of either time or variety, you don’t need the other. In fact, when occurrences of a wonderful experience are sufficiently distributed across time, variety can actually be costly.
– While the human brain excels at simulating things it imagines the future may contain, one weakness of the brain is it rarely notices missing aspects of the simulation.
– People consistently overestimate how bad they’ll feel after a negative event such as losing a job or a romantic partner, and for how long they’ll feel bad.
– When facts challenge our favored conclusion, we scrutinize the facts more carefully. In other words, if we don’t want to believe something, we require much more evidence in order to believe than a neutral party would require.
– Delusion is essentially our brain tricking us by unconsciously cooking up facts that consciously we believe would be comfortable beliefs to hold. This is why it’s so difficult to be introspective.
– Research shows that when people are given electric shocks, they actually feel less pain if they believe they are suffering for something of value.
– One of the most reliable facts science has given us is that the average person doesn’t see themselves as average. They see themselves as more intelligent, more competent, and less biased than average.
Best Quotes
– “Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.
– Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.”
– “First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. For instance, volunteers in one study received a series of twenty electric shocks and were warned three seconds before the onset of each one. Some volunteers (the high-shock group) received twenty high-intensity shocks to their right ankles. Other volunteers (the low-shock group) received three high-intensity shocks and seventeen low-intensity shocks. Although the low-shock group received fewer volts than the high-shock group did, their hearts beat faster, they sweated more profusely, and they rated themselves as more afraid. Why? Because volunteers in the low-shock group received shocks of different intensities at different times, which made it impossible for them to anticipate their futures. Apparently, three big jolts that one cannot foresee are more painful than twenty big jolts that one can.”
– “The point here is that when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.”
– “When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen”
– “When dating couples try to recall what they thought about their romantic partners two months earlier, they tend to remember that they felt then as what they feel now.”
– “Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will.”
– “The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.”
– “Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them. Oddly enough, an explanation doesn’t actually have to explain anything to have these effects—it merely needs to seem as though it does.”
– “We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret. The trouble is that we often don’t remember them correctly.”
– “…We naturally (but incorrectly) assume that things that come easily to mind are things we have frequently encountered.”
– “We tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times.”
Conclusion
Stumbling on Happiness is worth a read as it’ll offer you a fresh perspective on happiness. I would’ve loved to have had more concrete actionable steps from the book, but it’s still an excellent book given how it can improve your mental model of how to pursue happiness and what is and isn’t likely to actually make you happy.