Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

They are not dumb mistakes but smart mistakes—mistakes that allow those who understand them to glimpse the elegant design and inner workings

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine—ah,

to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be.

The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this abilit...

risks obscuring the fact that brains are continuously making predictions about the immediate,

local, personal future of their owners without their owners’ awareness.

It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Small children look appropriately puzzled, worried perhaps that our question implies they are at some risk of growing down. If they answer at all, they generally come up with things like “the candy guy” or “a tree climber.”

these are the wrong answers to our question, they are the right answers to another question, namely, “What do you want to be now?”

Unlike the child who can only think about how things are, the adult is able to think about how things will be. At some point between our high chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about later.

centered on a particular part of the brain known as the frontal lobe,

The frontal lobe is the recent addition to the human brain that allows us to imagine the future.

N.N.’s inability to think about his own future is characteristic of patients with frontal lobe damage.

not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor.

like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists this suggestion.

most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness

(most of us can recall an instance in which we made love with a desirable partner or ate a wickedly rich dessert, only to find that the act was better contemplated than consummated),

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.

Apparently, three big jolts that one cannot foresee are more painful than twenty big jolts that one can.

Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.

behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.

Why? Because they did it, that’s why.

research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.

Six months later, 30 percent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 percent of the residents in the high-control group.

Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.

people behave in a way that would be utterly absurd if they believed that they had no control over an uncontrollable event.

These and other findings have led some researchers to conclude that the feeling of control—whether real or illusory—is one of the wellsprings of mental health.

our uniquely human ability to think about the extended future allows us to choose the best destinations and avoid the worst.

We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time.

Just as our eyes

sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee...

we realize it ought to be a source of pleasurable feeling but that it sure doesn’t feel that way at the moment.

And outside of science fiction, no one can actually have another person’s experience.

research has shown that people fail to notice a wide range of these “visual discontinuities,”

we will be forced to rely on our memories—forced to compare our current experience to our recollection of our former experience—in order to detect the change.

Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.

Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future,

But I did, and because I did I now know what I am missing when I don’t, hence that glorious moment during my spring vacation when I am reclining in a lawn chair on the golden sands of Kauai, sipping Talisker and watching the sun slip slowly into a taffeta sea, is just not quite perfect if I don’t also have something stinky and Cuban in my mouth.

he was when he took that life-giving sip from a rusty canteen, or is it more reasonable to say that a sip of water can be a source of ecstasy or a source of moisture depending on one’s experiential background?

Every day would be a repudiation of the day before, as we experienced greater and greater happiness and realized how thoroughly deluded we were until, conveniently enough, now.

—from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience.

As we’ve seen, happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe to ourselves and to others, thus evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business.

“How are you?” is overly familiar for the same reason that “How am I?” is overly strange. And yet, strange as it is, there are times when people seem not to know their own hearts.

flannel—but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience?

analyze just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision:

very general stages of this identification process to decide whether an object is scary, but not enough information to know what the object is.

But because they were being interviewed by an attractive woman, they mistakenly identified their arousal as sexual attraction.

blouse—which is simply to say that people can be wrong about what they are feeling.

our interpretation of our arousal depends on what we believe caused it.