Good read: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Book Review: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

         Not another book about "how to be happy" that leaves you with more questions than you had from the start. Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness is a witty and insightful look at the flaws of human foresight and WHY happiness is so difficult to achieve. Mis-judgements of our memory and foresight cause us to stumble on our journey to seek out happiness. We remember life events by the bulk, key points, leaving out the small details that are essential to the recreation of the real experience in our brains. When we imagine future scenarios, we once again skip over the details and other aspects of life, judging how we will feel solely by the situation we are imagining. Though very complex, our brains can not regenerate or forecast experiences in their whole form.
        Thinking about future events can make us excited, and often, we overestimate the happiness we will feel, leaving us disappointed and stumbling. This may sound like a morbid thought, that humans set themselves up for disappointment, but if we become aware of this overestimation in the brain, we can adjust accordingly and experience the happiness that future events do provide, rather than experience real events IN CONTRAST to how we imagined them.
Conversely, we overestimate how UNhappy we will feel if some undesirable situation were to come about, like becoming physically disabled. When such dreaded scenarios do come about, we end up feeling happier than we would have imagined ourselves. Take, for example, an individual who becomes bed ridden due to an illness. It is not uncommon to hear these people report feeling more grateful than ever before, feeling more hope and happiness with family support and care. Meanwhile, when we imagine becoming bed ridden, we solely think about our lives being reduced to imprisonment in a bed. We don't focus on the positive aspects because it is generally an undesirable life circumstance.
         Though most of the book discusses the human condition and its misestimations, Gilbert does provide some advice on getting around our foresight flaws. Gilbert claims the best way we can accurately imagine future situations is to talk with someone who is having that experience right now. This first-hand report from someone currently immersed in a situation is a much better indicator for our future feelings than our own deceiving imaginations.