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Stumbling on Happiness

3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 · rating details · 14,382 ratings · 1,359 reviews

• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink?• Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? • Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can...more

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Published May 2nd 2006 by Vintage (first published January 1st 2006)

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Sep 18, 2007 Lena rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, how-the-brain-works

This is pretty much the opposite of a self-help book. Instead of telling you how you can be happier, Harvard Psychology professor Gilbert talks about why we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy in the first place. Gilbert is a smooth and entertaining writer, and he does a good job of explaining in detail the cognitive errors we make in trying to predict our future happiness. For those who hope to gain some practical value from the book, Gilbert also outlines one technique that has be...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, science, social-theory

Years ago there was a poster that appeared around Melbourne of a young man with one of those far away looks in his eyes. The photo in the poster was extreme close up and the expression on the young man’s face was that which I believe only comes from religious ecstasy or a particularly transporting bowel movement. In bold type under this young man’s face was the single word Happiness. Below this in smaller type was Transcendental Meditation. I figured we were talking religion rather than laxative...more

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May 01, 2008 kareem rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. We have brains that allow us to predict the future
We predict the future based on past memories

BUT our past memories are falliable: we tend to fill in details in our memories - we remember things not as they actually happened, but as we think they happened when we think about them in the future.

AND we predict poorly because
1. we fill in details that will never come to pass (we are optimists!)
2. we leave out (often unpleasant) details that do come to pass

ALSO when thinking about the future, we fin...more

14 likes · like · see review

Oct 12, 2007 Foster rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: economics

I just finished Daniel Gilbert’s new book, and it’s highly recommended. Next time in Cambridge, I’ll be asking him to join me at Grafton Street for a Guinness (you’ll get this if you read the book).

He uses one of the most humorous and accessible non-fiction, science-related writing styles to explain a whole genre of psychological, psychiatric, and philosophical research. His basic message is that we are crap at remembering our past happiness, and also terrible at making decisions that would incr...more

9 likes · like · see review

May 05, 2007 Caitlin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone except most moralists and libertarians... so... none of my friends. ;b

Shelves: psychology, american

April 2007, first impression: So far, this book is witty, eye-opening and really fun. Also really well researched. He references Daniel C. Dennett in the first five pages, so how could I not love it?

May 2007, upon completion: Update...

Ultimately, I decided to give this book three stars because I believe that it is a ballsy and well-executed attempt to take on an impossibly difficult problem (happiness - that's a biggie). For the most part, I admire Gilbert's methods, though they ALL become incr...more April 2007, first impression: So far, this book is witty, eye-opening and really fun. Also really well researched. He references Daniel C. Dennett in the first five pages, so how could I not love it?

May 2007, upon completion: Update...

Ultimately, I decided to give this book three stars because I believe that it is a ballsy and well-executed attempt to take on an impossibly difficult problem (happiness - that's a biggie). For the most part, I admire Gilbert's methods, though they ALL become incredibly frustrating somewhere around page 200. The book is witty, incredibly well researched, and Gilbert is (mostly) unwilling to extrapolate the massive amounts of data he compiles into proscriptive solutions for finding happiness.

Fortunately, these make the book:

* pretty easy to follow
* informative and enlightening (if you're not already familiar with most of the research - some of the psychological effects he outlines are well-known to the point of being cliché, but many are either head-scratchers or jaw-droppers on their own merits or are interpreted here in interesting ways which bolster his mostly critical (rather than constructive) thesis)
* very NOT another preachy or rosy-tinted self-help franchise (yet).

Unfortunately:

* the tone ultimately makes the book repetitive and tiresome (much like being in the room with an otherwise intelligent person who laughs a little too much at their own jokes)
* the research often obfuscates rather than elucidates already fuzzy points (again, he makes his criticisms clear, but sometimes it's unclear what he is actually trying to *say* by pointing them out)
* for most of the book it seems as though he's really verging on some great ideas, but doesn't want to stick his neck out for them, which leaves the reader exhausted trying to generate their own implications and solutions for the problems he identifies...

You can read the rest of my review here (it was too long for goodreads): http://caitfish.livejournal.com/14552...

And a subsuquent review after some more thought:
http://caitfish.livejournal.com/14589...(less)

10 likes · like · see review

May 13, 2008 Guy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: socsci

First thing you need to know about this book: it's cognitive psychology, not self-help. To Gilbert's credit, he states this clearly early on... but by then, for many purchasers, it will be too late, since the cover fairly shouts "Self-Help!!".

So, to be clear: "Stumbling on Happiness" won't do much to help you be happy, but it will help you understand some of the many reasons as to why, despite our best efforts, we so often fail to be so.

But only some of the reasons, and frankly only some of the...more

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Aug 07, 2007 Inder rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: couldntfinish

Is it just me, or is the author of this book unusually cocky in his writing style? Gilbert reiterates a bunch of basic ideas that any normal, reasonably intelligent person should already have arrived at (like, you shouldn't judge another person's life without all of the facts, and, wow, things never turn out quite how you plan them) and then acts like he's discovered a new planet. His tone is one of an utterly brilliant professor talking down to his idiotic, simple students.

I was actually, mild...more

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Mar 15, 2009 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If you are technical or scientific then "Stumbling on Happiness" may be a good read for you. For me, Daniel Gilbert's conclusions were fascinating but most may be garnered by reading his articles or the last chapter of his book. As Gilbert admits in his foreword, his book is not about happiness so much as it is about the way that our minds work in an attempt to find happiness.

Particulary interesting to me were his findings on children and happiness. "Every human culture tells its members that h...more

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Sep 25, 2010 Bettie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned

mp3 workaday

Zoikes! I should have realised by the title what this would be about but I am always droopy and zonked in the early mornings. So what did I get here? Self Improvement WITH crazy Xylophone Music.

Too much man!

3 likes · like · see review

May 31, 2012 Rebecca rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: pop-science

This is another one of those books, like Blink or Outliers, where an author applies science in an unorthodox way, flings a bunch of interesting anecdotes and studies at you, and pretends to draw more conclusions than are actually warrented. You can tell because the cover is completely white with a single, extra shiny object slightly off-center and the title in a trendy modernist color.

I'll give Gilbert this--he's an unusually witty writer. I literally laughed out loud throughout this book. But I...more

4 likes · like · see review

Aug 20, 2008 Maggie Campbell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking."

"This is when I learned that mistakes are interesting and began planning a life that contained several of them."

"Surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than what we got, ev...more

5 likes · like · see review

May 29, 2008 Alana rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Alana by: Angela

Shelves: 2008_05_may, reviewed

I was given this book by a friend who likened the style to Alain de Botton. While I don't agree with the comparison, I can understand that the genre bears certain similarities -- a nonfiction book with meandering tone, musing on a single topic -- but because this is primarily about psychology and the way we make decisions, I wouldn't really put these on the same shelf.
That being said, this was an interesting read... although I've been "currently-reading" this in bits for about a year now, so th...more

2 likes · like · see review

Mar 25, 2008 Cjasper rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: my-books

I think this book should have been called Stumbling on Humility, cause what I took from it is that I'm not even as happy as I thought I was, and really, I didn't think I was that happy to begin with. So, I get it, our perception is flawed. Our ability to remember, perceive and predict is not well developed. I have thought of this book and brought it up in conversation quite a bit because either a)it has a lot of real life applications or b) I'm kind of obsessed with the subject of happiness. I w...more

3 likes · like · see review

Dec 03, 2007 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone

Shelves: psychology-popular, psychology-science

The author Dan Gilbert, is a gifted teacher and professor of social psychology at Harvard. This book is an overview of his research on affective forecasting, which examines what and how people think about their own emotions. This line of research began with the question of how accurate are people at predicting how they will respond emotionally to a variety of experiences. Not very well, it turns out. This led to an examination of the factors that lead to these fascinating mistakes that we all ma...more

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Apr 14, 2008 B. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Two of the abilities that separate us from the beasties; the ability to remember the past and the ability to imagine the future; receive a thorough analysis from author Daniel Gilbert that inform us just how unreliable these faculties can be. We create illusions on a daily basis that enable us to find happiness no matter what life tosses our way. This is fascinating stuff. Much of what our senses tell us is real, much of what we remember of our past, and much of what we anticipate will be true i...more

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Sep 09, 2007 Alicia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stumbling On Happiness and is my current rebellion book. (It isn't on my assigned reading list.) and it is a fascinating book. The author explores our perception of happiness and why we consistantly guess wrong about what will make us happy. How, once a moment has passed, it is impossible for the individual who experienced the moment to accurately rate how happy that moment made us because, our subsequent experiences change how we view that experience. How convinced we as Americans are that are...more

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Apr 27, 2008 Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Combining the rigor of scientific inquiry with the affability of a humorist, this remarkable book examines the brain's systematic inability to reliably predict what will make us happy. Gilbert shows how neurological structures that allow us to store and re-imagine information may serve us all too well, creating a persuasive yet fundamentally distorted picture of what we want and why we want it. A life-changing book, or at least ought to be. This, more than any other recent read, is the one I'm r...more

4 likes · like · see review

Apr 02, 2009 Victory Wong rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Interesting book. No it's not a self-help, although there's nothing wrong with self-help books... Anyway, this is the science of why we can't find happiness as our present self for our future selves b/c we are unable to predict what our future selves will like. Say we pack a lunch and we think it's fabulous and then we open it and look at it (and it's not squashed or whatever) and we just aren't as excited... Or say we imagine what our future world's will look like-- funny they look a lot like t...more

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May 13, 2013 Erika RS rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of the better of the current glut of positive psychology books. This book is high quality because Gilbert does not focus on happiness. He rarely talks about happiness directly. He focuses on cognitive tendencies of human beings and their effects on how people interpret how they feel, remember how they felt, and anticipate how they will feel.

One cognitive trick that reoccurs throughout the book is that the brain summarizes. Memories of the past are not faithful recordings of the event...more This is one of the better of the current glut of positive psychology books. This book is high quality because Gilbert does not focus on happiness. He rarely talks about happiness directly. He focuses on cognitive tendencies of human beings and their effects on how people interpret how they feel, remember how they felt, and anticipate how they will feel.

One cognitive trick that reoccurs throughout the book is that the brain summarizes. Memories of the past are not faithful recordings of the events but reconstructions based on a few key points. Observations of the present only gather a small part of the information around. (Side note: it is my opinion that this is why the faddish "law of attraction" seems to work. Focusing on a desire does not change the world, but it does change your perception of the world.)

Summarizing also applies to images of the future (although the exact word choice becomes a little odd). One's predictions tend to focus on a few key points and ignore everything else. For example, most people would feel that they will have a strong and long lasting reaction to the outcome of the next presidential election. Often, people are right about the strength of their reaction, but they are very wrong about the duration. This mistake occurs because predictions of the future leave out the details about the rest of life that tend to very quickly temper your emotions (whether your candidate wins or loses, you will still, for example, have to walk in the rain and will still get to go out to a nice dinner).

That is not all there is to this. Although people tend to over estimate their future happiness or unhappiness, the strength of their anticipation tends to color how they remember an event. Thus, if you think you will feel some amount of happiness from event and you actually feel some different amount, the amount of happiness you remember feeling will be somewhere between the two.

Gilbert does not give happiness tips, but I will take a stab at using his observations to analyze some common happiness tips. Consider the following (seemingly inconsistent) tips: live in the moment, look forward to the future, do not worry too much about the future, do not dwell on the past, cherish your happy memories. If you compare these tips with what we know about the mind, you can start to see why they all can help. Focusing on the moment raises the happiness you actually experience. Anticipation raises the happiness you will remember having experienced. Remembering past experiences provides material for your mind to use when it is making predictions about the future, so focusing on the happy memories will help you to anticipate that similar future events will bring happiness.

This book does not pretend to have all the answers. Instead, it focuses on helping you to understand how the human mind works. With these tools, you can begin to understand why certain bits of common wisdom on happiness work and why they sometimes fail. And, if you are like me, just knowing that makes you a little bit happier.(less)

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May 08, 2013 Uco Library added it · review of another edition

Shelves: naomi-schemm

Happiness: that amorphous goal that everyone seems to be pursuing but nobody can quite tell you how to find. Well, this book isn’t a self-help book and doesn’t presume to tell you how to find happiness. But it does attempt to tell you how the human race defines and (mis)measures happiness; the many ways we try to predict and achieve it; why we aren’t as good at planning and predicting it as we think we should be; why we still somehow manage to be reasonably happy even when our current circumstan...more Happiness: that amorphous goal that everyone seems to be pursuing but nobody can quite tell you how to find. Well, this book isn’t a self-help book and doesn’t presume to tell you how to find happiness. But it does attempt to tell you how the human race defines and (mis)measures happiness; the many ways we try to predict and achieve it; why we aren’t as good at planning and predicting it as we think we should be; why we still somehow manage to be reasonably happy even when our current circumstances are what our previous selves predicted would make us miserable; and how most of us ignore what science demonstrates can be a far more accurate way to predict one’s future feelings, thoughts, and level of happiness.

Gilbert is a Harvard psychology professor and a very entertaining yet well-researched writer. He discusses a wide range of scientific experiments and common-sense observations about everything from Phineas Gage’s bizarre 1848 brain injury to child development, from the laws of probability to consumer purchasing habits, and in doing so he illustrates the sometimes self-evident but often surprising things scientists have learned about the brain and emotion. Reading his examples, I found plenty of real-life applications, as I found myself recognizing more about my own mental processes (“oh, so that’s why I remember XYZ that way”) and being entertained by others’ foibles (“that explains why he does that even though it makes no logical sense!”). While I can certainly hope I can be self-aware enough to avoid the more-dangerous mental traps (now that I’ve achieved such wisdom by reading this book, right?!), Gilbert also highlights how universal – and, often, absolutely essential to normal human functioning – these quirks of human perception and emotion really are. That fact alone makes this book accessible and applicable to anyone with a frontal lobe behind your eyebrows.

I enjoyed and would recommend this book, especially to readers who enjoy the similarly off-beat science explorations of Mary Roach or the assumption-challenging books of Malcolm Gladwell (who endorsed this book) or Daniel Pink. Chambers Library has several titles by those authors as well.
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Apr 08, 2013 Andreia Fernandes rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Tedious and repetitive nonsense

I swear I'd rather kill myself than listen to this book again!! I couldn't tolerate again this hell of a book with this tedious author rumbling about the theory to prove that happiness is just a concept that can vary from people to people, he means, what's to be happy to me can mean not to be happy to you and so on and so forth. The book is totally unnecessary and could be resumed in just a phrase or two. Still, the most annoying characteristic of the book is the...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Mandy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This isn't like a lot of other Happiness books that I've read that concentrate on discovering which activities can bring more pleasure into our lives. This book delves into our imaginations and memories, how the workings of our mind can fool us into remembering things as better than they were or imagining a future life that will be better than the present.

I think this book is slightly mis-titled, as it is more related to the subject of how our minds work, or how to make better decisions. Maybe t...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Katie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is an entertaining, informative book on how we can make ourselves happy – or miserable. We do this by telling ourselves stories – stories which we stubbornly invest in as being the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For example, when we recall something in the past, we fill in holes in our memory with what we imagine to have happened. (No, our memories are not perfect video-taped episodes of what exactly occurred. Have you ever shared a memory with someone and come up with different det...more

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May 03, 2012 Ada Gao rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-2012-advisory

Stumbling on Happiness is a book with no particular plot. Actually it has no plot at all. This book is mainly about logic, they ask you different types of questions, and you were suppose to use your logic to understand it when they explain it to you. For example, there was a question about how your brain works, the sub conscious, conscious, and the non consciousness. So all this book has is questions. There are no characters, no plot. Just questions. The question they ask you are really interes...more

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May 01, 2012 Mick kar-oh-lack rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Loving this book. It is heavy on the psyche thinking and the intellectual, yet also real world and chock full of applicable real life examples of how and why we see things as we do and how full of it we are. I am right now almost 2/3 through the book, and if you asked me what it is about, I would be hard-pressed to say - specifically. But if you asked me to tell you about the thinking I am doing via reading this, I could tell you of some realizations... but still nothing HARD.

---- Gilbert is a...more

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Apr 25, 2012 Katie Robson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm still reading this book (only half-way through so far), but it has been so entertaining and enlightening. Although densely packed with scientific studies and information, the writing style, while academic in nature, also manages to be humorous and entertaining.

The book is split into six sections, covering: prospection, subjectivity, realism, presentism, rationalization, and corrigibility., all of which covers what happiness is in theory (it's definition, where the emotion comes from, how peo...more I'm still reading this book (only half-way through so far), but it has been so entertaining and enlightening. Although densely packed with scientific studies and information, the writing style, while academic in nature, also manages to be humorous and entertaining.

The book is split into six sections, covering: prospection, subjectivity, realism, presentism, rationalization, and corrigibility., all of which covers what happiness is in theory (it's definition, where the emotion comes from, how people go about describing it, etc.) to what it is scientifically, and how our brains react both immediately to certain situations, as well as what happens to our brains over varying periods of time after we experience those situations. Gilbert also focuses on the role happiness plays in our pasts, presents, and futures, and the ways in which our brains distort those feelings throughout time. Time plays an important role in happiness, as Gilbert states,

"Time is not an object but an abstraction, hence it does not lend itself to imagery...and yet, predicting our emotional futures requires that we think in and about and across swatches of time. If we can't create a mental image of an abstract concept such as time, then how do we think and reason about it?" (128).

And thus, consequently, how do we go about predicting our own future happiness across various potential situations? Especially enlightening was the section about the things that our brains miss (the "missing pieces") when constructing ideas about happiness in the future.

Much of what Gilbert presents isn't necessarily all that foreign to the reader - I often found myself thinking, "yeah, that IS right," or, "yeah, I AM guilty of that sometimes." What Gilberts especially excels at is pointing these ideas out to you eloquently, in an order where they all flow and make perfect sense together; Gilbert has a very approachable way of illuminating what would otherwise be dense scientific material into information more easily grasped through a variety of examples. Although it is not a self-help book at it's core, one can definitely take many of the principles he discusses and work consciously to adopt a new way of thinking that could affect present and, especially, future perceptions of happiness, to potentially lead a happier life.(less)

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Apr 23, 2012 Ron rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Gilbert's argument in this book is the best endorsement for reading other people's reviews of the book, because if what he says is accurate, they are more reliable indicators of customer satisfaction than how customers imagine they'll feel after making any purchase. If that seems like a no-brainer, then you won't find yourself greatly illuminated by this book. While I'd still give this book 4 stars for its often interesting survey of cognitive research about the behavior of imagination in predic...more

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Mar 15, 2012 Katie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Katie by: Eric

Shelves: non-fiction, borrowed

The title and cover design were very poorly chosen [don't judge this book by its cover! shoot me now...]. I went in expecting some off-the-rack self-help book, but found myself sucked in from the first page. Gilbert is a brilliant writer and very accessible to the psychology layperson, though I think his assumptions and analogies will be best appreciated by those familiar with (and enamored of) university culture.

This book is a wonderful introduction to the psychology of memory, how we perceive...more

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Oct 21, 2011 Richard Finney rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Because I basically now only read books for research material for my writing projects, and doing reviews on them would be BORING… I decided to post some thoughts on books that influenced my life. When I say “influenced” it could be profound… or even a book that I enjoyed so much that it became a marker for a particular type of genre of entertainment that I have since enjoyed all my life.

Today I write about “Stumbling on Happiness.”
I bought this book because it has Steven D. Levitt, author of “F...more Because I basically now only read books for research material for my writing projects, and doing reviews on them would be BORING… I decided to post some thoughts on books that influenced my life. When I say “influenced” it could be profound… or even a book that I enjoyed so much that it became a marker for a particular type of genre of entertainment that I have since enjoyed all my life.

Today I write about “Stumbling on Happiness.”
I bought this book because it has Steven D. Levitt, author of “Freakonomics,” giving it a positive blurb on the front cover. I really enjoyed Levitt’s book, and was hoping for more of the same. This book had even more to offer.
Speaking strictly from a Western point of view, I believe sound wisdom for modern living is hard to come by nowadays, which is a real shame, because we really need it.
I believe the world in the last 50 years has become very complex, not only in the interpersonal/familial arena of modern and post-modern living, but also when we consider the accelerated technological progress that has impacted everyone in the last 25 years. This review is not the place to go into any details to back up my claim… so I will tell a story.
Several years ago I was interviewing a scientist (I’ll call him “Dr. Hal”) for research on a screenplay I was writing. We were talking and crossing the street and we came across a dead squirrel that had been hit by a car. Whatever we were talking about, it was totally appropriate for Dr. Hal to comment, “look at this poor creature here, lying as road kill. And do you want to know why? Because his little brain has been fine-tuned over hundreds of generations to avoid all of his food chain enemies so he can reproduce and keep his numbers strong as a species. But one of the things his brain was not programed for was fast moving, large bulky objects of steel, moving at incredible speeds. These objects the squirrel either misjudges, or worse - in a very significant way, he is “blind” to the impending threat because his brain simply does not register this speedy steel attacking creature as lethal because for thousands and thousands of years it’s never had to.”
Now I’ve never checked Dr. Hal’s observations on squirrels and cars to see if he’s onto something or if he just impressed me with something that I obviously found interesting enough that I’m repeating here. But I think it captures my feelings about a point in history that humanity is now facing.
As a species we have acquired certain skills, as it turns out, exclusive neurological skills that allowed us to triumph over our competitors as we fought our way up the ladder of evolution. One of the skills is that our brain became quite adept at seeing “patterns.” This skill allowed us to track game for instance. We also mastered the skill of abstract thinking. Put the two together and we could think about something that was going to happen (because it had repeatedly happened before), then plan ahead, be there before the final outcome (eventually even channeling the path of the outcome) and then take advantage of our forethought and planning.
But as we evolved as a species we also fell short in certain areas.
We weren’t so great at planning way ahead. As Professor Diamond ponders in his book, “Collapse” -- what were the Eastern Islanders thinking as they cut down the last tree on the island, the final act in a steady and destructive march toward bringing about their extinction? (My answer is that I think they were probably convinced that somehow their “God” or “Gods” would save them from their foolish behavior).
So we homo-sapiens are “gifted” and “flawed” as a species. And along comes the 21st century.
This is where Daniel Gilbert’s book begins. He explains the gifts and illuminates the flaws or limitations of our brains. Limitations that challenge individuals to find happiness in a modern world. He makes the case that we are our own worst enemy.
His insights are not the stuff of personal opinion that I’ve indulged in above. His insights are backed up by studies and tests that will not only convince you of their veracity, I believe they will profoundly affect you if you’re at a point in your life where you are looking for some guidance to discover who you are and how you can proceed on the right path to a state of happiness.
Maybe the above sounds too… new age. Then I have failed to convey how this book is really trying to open up some doors to really explain how humans think on a fundamental level. And there’s nothing “self-help” about it. That part you have to do on your own.
I seldom recommend books to my daughters (age 18 and 21), but this one I did recommend to my youngest because I think as you begin your adult life a book like this can have a profound impact. And she loved it. If only I was able to have read it when I was 18, maybe I wouldn’t have made some of the mistakes I’ve made with my own life.
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Jul 17, 2011 Ranga Kamaladasa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Entertaining, informative and scientific. Three words rarely used to describe a book on happiness. But yes, it's true; Daniel Gilbert's acclaimed book lives up to it's hype and even exceeds it.

The book goes on to describe what it means to be human, how difficult it is for us to fathom anything except the present, how our memories deceive us, how our forecasts of the future is utterly flawed, and how our bodies experience while the mind simulates. Although the book's narrative tie everything bac...more

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About Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research with Tim Wilson on "affective forecasting" investigates how and how well people can make predictions about the emotional impact of future events.

Dan has won numerous awards for his teaching and research—from the Guggenheim Fellowship to the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific...more

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“My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.” — 29 people liked it

“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.” — 25 people liked it

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title link	preview: Stumbling on Happiness
avg rating	preview: Stumbling on Happiness Goodreads rating: 3.74 (14382 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7031246-stumbling-on-happiness?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360575448l/7031246.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7031246-stumbling-on-happiness?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert[/url]

Stumbling on Happiness

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