Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

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 faculty that allows us to see the present).

We can inspect a mental image and see who is doing what and where, but not when they are doing it. In general, mental images are atemporal.

Because predictions about the future are made in the present, they are inevitably influenced by the present.

Disambiguating Objects Most stimuli are ambiguous—that is, they can mean more than one thing—and the interesting question is how we disambiguate them—that is, how we know which of a stimulus’s many meanings to infer on a particular occasion. Research shows that context, frequency, and recency are especially important in this regard.

Fig. 18. If you stare at a Necker cube, it will appear to shift its orientation.

One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word’s ambiguity for its own gratification.

If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning,

but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.

we might think of them as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness.27

A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it

So if we are to believe something, then it must be supported by—or at least not blatantly contradicted by—the facts.

The answer is simple: We cook the facts.

On the contrary, 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.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants.

We accomplish this by unconsciously cooking the facts and then consciously consuming them.

Firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge are the only two kinds of knowledge there are, and no matter what task we master—

Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.

Our brains use facts and theories to make guesses about past events, and so too do they use facts and theories to make guesses about past feelings.18

Fig. 22. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, partisans expected the Supreme Court’s decision to strongly influence how happy they would feel a day after the decision was announced (bars on the left). A few months later they remembered that it had (bars on the right). In fact, the decision had a far smaller impact on happiness than the partisans either predicted or remembered (bars in the middle).

Almost any time we tell anyone anything, we are attempting to change the way their brains operate—attempting to change the way they see the world so that their view of it more closely resembles our own.

Market economies require that we all have an insatiable hunger for stuff, and if everyone were content with the stuff they had, then the economy would grind to a halt.

Every parent knows that children are a lot of work—a lot of really hard work—and although parenting has many rewarding moments, the vast majority of its moments involve dull and selfless service to people who will take decades to become even begrudgingly grateful for what we are doing.

The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true.

Imagination has three shortcomings, and if you didn’t know that then you may be reading this book backward.

imagination’s first shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us

Imagination’s second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future

Imagination’s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen—in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better

What makes us think we’re so darned special?

First, even if we aren’t special, the way we know ourselves is. We are the only people in the world whom we can know from the inside.

The second reason is that we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special.

The third reason why we tend to overestimate our uniqueness is that we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness—that is, we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually are.

The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.

Because individuals don’t usually feel that it is their personal duty to preserve social systems, these ideas must disguise themselves as prescriptions for individual happiness.

The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields.