Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert

Thoughts: It was several years between when I read this book and when I finished converting highlights to notes, so I can’t say much about the experience of reading it, other than a vague recollection about enjoying it. The central idea is that we have a hard time remembering how we felt in the past or imagining how we will feel in the future, and our imagination steps in to fill in the blanks. It fills in details that are similar to our current circumstances, leading to systematic errors when making predictions about whether a given course of action will make us happier in the future. Stumbling on Happiness is pop psychology, but it contains some worthwhile insights.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. I read this as an e-book, so page numbers are as they appeared in the app I used, Libby.)

Gilbert, Daniel. 2006. Stumbling on Happiness. Random House.

Part I - Prospection

Chapter 1: Journey to Elsewhen

• 18: Gilbert notes that basically all creatures with brains make predictions about what will happen to them in the near future - “rather than saying that such brains are predicting [as human brains do], let’s say they’re nexting.” Human brains also engage in lots of nexting, but we appear to be unique in how far we look into the future.
• 34: humans seek to exert control over their environment/situation, and people with more agency over their situation are happier and healthier than those with less agency.
• 35: Sometimes we even behave as though we can control things that are actually uncontrollable. “Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations”
• 37-38: Gilbert argues that we think we’re better at predicting/imagining how we’ll feel in the future than we actually are. He outlines three outcomes in our imaginative faculties that create this effect:
  • 37: “Imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products.”
  • “Imagination’s products are… not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.”
  • 37-38: “Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there.”

Part II - Subjectivity

Chapter 2: The View from in Here

Chapter 3: Outside Looking In

Part III - Realism

Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye

Chapter 5: The Hounds of Silence

• 110: “The general inability to think about absences is a potent source of error in everyday life.” i.e. we tend to notice events that happen, but we don’t have a good sense of events that don’t happen (but could have)
• 113: “When we are selecting [among a range of alternatives], we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting [deciding which among a range of alternatives to abandon/discard], we consider the negative attributes.”
  • 120: this is important because we tend to imagine near-future events in greater detail, and with negatives in clearer focus, than distant-future events

Part IV - Presentism

Chapter 6: The Future Is Now

• 125: The writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated what has come to be known as Clarke’s first law: “‘When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.’ In other words, when scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present.”
• 125: “As it turns out, when brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of yesterday and tomorrow, they tend to use a material called today. Consider how often this happens when we try to remember the past. When college students hear persuasive speeches that demonstrably change their political opinions, they tend to remember that they always felt as they currently feel.”
• 139: “Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend these boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective…. Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running.”

Chapter 7: Time Bombs

• 143-144: “Human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to [counteract habituation]: variety and time. One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences…. Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience…. If you have one, then you don’t need the other. In fact,… when episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary—it can actually be costly.”
• 157: “If we want to predict how something will make us feel in the future, we must consider the kind of comparison we will be making in the future and not the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present. Alas, because we make comparisons without even thinking about them…., we rarely consider the fact that the comparisons we are making now may not be the ones we are making later.”
• 159: The above helps explain “why we love new things when we buy them and then stop loving them shortly thereafter. When we start shopping for a new pair of sunglasses, we naturally contrast the hip, stylish ones in the store with the old, outdated ones that are sitting on our noses. So we buy the new ones and stick the old ones in a drawer. But after just a few days of wearing our new sunglasses we stop comparing them with the old pair, and… the delight that the comparison produced evaporates.”

Part V - Rationalization

Chapter 8: Paradise Glossed

• 170: “When your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it in the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency, and recency do.”

Chapter 9: Immune to Reality

• 193: “People of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.”
• 197: “It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience.”
• 198: “Our failure to anticipate that inescapability will trigger our psychological immune systems (hence promote our happiness and satisfaction) can cause us to make some painful mistakes. For example, when a new group of photography students was asked whether they would prefer to have or not to have the opportunity to change their minds about which photograph to keep, the vast majority preferred to have the opportunity—that is, the vast majority preferred to enroll in a photography course in which they would ultimately be dissatisfied with the photograph they produced.” j: cf. Ch. 1’s discussion of control - presumably the students enjoyed the decision of picking a photograph more than being handed one, ultimately dooming them to dissatisfaction when looking at their memento from the course. I wonder whether there’s a way around this contradiction!
• 204: When a nice thing happens to us, we tend to experience less happiness if there is a clear explanation/cause for the nice thing than if the cause is unclear. “Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case.”
• 205: summary of the effects of our ability to rationalize: “We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation we cannot escape than of one we can.”

Part IV - Corrigibility

Chapter 10: Once Bitten

• 243: “Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student…” …etc.