Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.

The best way to understand this particular shortcoming of imagination (the faculty that allows us to see the future) is to understand the shortcomings of memory (the faculty that allows us to see the past) and perception

the shortcoming that causes us to misremember the past and misperceive the present is the very same shortcoming that causes us to misimagine the future.

when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of imagination.

Our inattention to absences influences the way that we think about the future. Just as we do not remember every detail of a past event (what color socks did you wear to your high school graduation?) or see every detail of a current event (what color socks is the person behind you wearing at this very moment?), so do we fail to imagine every detail of a future event.

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.

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.

we spend countless hours and countless dollars carefully arranging our lives to ensure that we are surrounded by people who like us, and people who are like us. It isn’t surprising, then, that when we turn to the folks we know for advice and opinions, they tend to confirm our favored conclusions—either because they share them or because they don’t want to hurt our feelings by telling us otherwise.

The psychological immune system is a defensive system, and it obeys this same principle. When experiences make us feel sufficiently unhappy, the psychological immune system cooks facts and shifts blame in order to offer us a more positive view.

it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.

we are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we’re stuck with than of the things we’re not.

The fact that the least likely experience is often the most likely memory can wreak havoc with our ability to predict future experiences.

Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moments, and theories about how we must have felt way back then, all of which gravely compromise our ability to learn from our own experience.

the average person doesn’t see herself as average.

We don’t always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities—minds unlike any others—and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

Bernoulli correctly realized that people are sensitive to relative rather than absolute magnitudes,

The simple, lawful relationships that bind numbers to numbers and words to words do not bind objective events to emotional experiences.

There is no simple formula for finding happiness.