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Stumbling on Happiness

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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Ratings:

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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.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 158
EAN: 9781400077427
ISBN: 1400077427
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2007-03-20
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2007-03-20
Studio: Vintage


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
• Outliers: The Story of Success
• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: has its moments
Comment: Overall, the book has some moments of insight and is a fairly easy read, so I can recommend it. If nothing else, I think the book will cause people to think about what makes them happy and allow them to better predict what might make them happy in the future. The most interesting chapter is the final one in which Gilbert takes up the topic of "super-replicators" or memes. I found his cursory treatment of this subject unsatisfying, however. I know that memes were not subject of this book, but still, I feel he could've done a little more here. Paul Gehrman, Author, Kaleidoscope

Customer Rating:
Summary: Engaging but little to take away
Comment: The book starts out very strong and engaging but gets weaker through the middle and especially at the end.

The focus of this book is to assess our ability to predict the future, and specifically whether or not this will make a person happy.

One aspect of this book I enjoyed is that it thoroughly considered time in its consideration of happiness. For example, the book would consider a situation and show how a person expected to feel in the present, BEFORE undertaking a certain action (say eating an ice-cream cone). It would then ask a person how the felt DURING the undertaking of a certain action. Then several weeks later would ask how the person REMEMBERED that certain action. The book does a very good job showing inconsistencies between how we predict how we will feel, how we feel at the time of a stimulus, and how we remember feeling the stimulus.

In the beginning in particular, the studies are described very vividly and are differentiated well. The message of the book is clear.

By the middle of the book, the reader is somewhat inundated with studies. And many of these studies are slight variants on the same idea that don't really elucidate the problem of imagination, or predicting happiness any better.

By the middle and the end, one realizes that it focuses on things like ice-cream cones and potato chips as source of pleasure-able feelings and doesn't offer a comprehensive model on happiness.

This book is not really geared about happiness so much as it is about recognizing many of the inconsistencies in human choice (mostly on more mundane things).

In its final chapter, the author really has VERY little to say on how to solve our inability to predict how the future will make us feel. He spends about a few pages recommending that we ask others who are experiencing the things currently that we would like to undertake.

(i.e. ask a practicing lawyer how much happiness they feel practicing law...).

In all the book is worth reading, but is by no means spectacular. The value in the book is in some of the ways that the author contrasts the past, present, future, human imagination and memory, and ties it all together to show where our blindspots are.

In all I'd give it about 3.5 stars...

Customer Rating:
Summary: Superbly Insightful (Well Beyond My Expectations)
Comment: Based on this book's title and a cursory glance at some reviews, I figured that this is probably just another book on happiness, but I decided to read it anyway since the ratings are generally pretty good, credible people have endorsed it, and the topic is important. I'm pleased to report that the book far exceeded my expectations and represents an important and original contribution to this genre. Despite having read quite a few books over the years, including several good ones on happiness, I learned a lot of new and useful things from this book.

In fact, this book is so packed with insights that I'll need to carefully go through it again (which I look forward to). Some readers may feel that the book goes into too many topics which are tangential to the main argument, but I personally very much appreciated the way Gilbert builds his case systematically and thoroughly, providing us with a wide array of intellectual fringe benefits in the process. Indeed, while the focus of the book is on happiness, the scope of the book is actually much broader than just happiness.

The content of the book is mostly drawn from experimental psychology (the good kind), and Gilbert describes many experiments in just the right amount of detail. I sometimes felt that he neglected plausible alternative interpretations of the experimental results, but I see this as a relatively minor issue. The earlier parts of the book also mixed in some Western philosophy, which I thought was a nice touch. And the many quotes from Shakespeare were also apropo since, after all, Shakespeare just about single-handedly encapsulated the full spectrum of human experience and behavior into his body of work!

Given the book's rich content, it's hard to summarize this book, but I would say that the (greatly oversimplified) main idea is that both our memory and imagination are inherently faulty, which often causes us to choose suboptimally when it comes to decisions which affect our future happiness. We can partly get around that problem by querying people who are currently having the experience we're considering having, but that approach doesn't always work, plus we're inherently resistant to taking that approach anyway. However, again, this is just an oversimplification, and you really need to read this book in its entirety.

Regarding Gilbert's writing style, I think he's quite clear and easy to follow, and he also employs humor throughout the book. To be honest, I initially found his humor superfluous and a bit annoying, but I gradually came to appreciate it, since it lightens the book's atmosphere and thereby helps to sustain the reader's stamina.

Overall, this is a superb book and I highly recommend it if you want to be happier, or even if you're just interested in what makes people tick. Five stars don't even begin to do justice to this book.

Customer Rating:
Summary: We think we know depression and we really don't know happiness
Comment: This is an excellent book by a skilled and funny writer. If you would like to get away from the negativity of the pop psychology of depression and learn more positive behaviors and happiness, put the antidepressant vial away and open the book.

Also, if you get a chance to hear Daniel Gilbert speak, go. Take notes. Steal his jokes.

Customer Rating:
Summary: I stopped reading it....
Comment: ...when it started to depress me. A great magazine article stretched into a book. Be more concise, Mr. Gilbert.

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