Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities,

I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.

The fact that it is so much easier to remember the past than to generate the possible causes us to make plenty of weird decisions.

We make mistakes when we compare with the past instead of the possible. When we do compare with the possible, we still make mistakes.

Our side-by-side comparisons can be influenced by extreme possibilities such as extravagant wines and dilapidated houses, but they can also be influenced by the addition of extra possibilities that are identical to those we are already considering.

One of the most insidious things about side-by-side comparison is that it leads us to pay attention to any attribute that distinguishes the possibilities we are comparing.

Now let’s step back for a moment and ask what all of these facts about comparison mean for our ability to imagine future feelings. The facts are these: (a) value is determined by the comparison of one thing with another; (b) there is more than one kind of comparison we can make in any given instance; and (c) we may value something more highly when we make one kind of comparison than when we make a different kind of comparison.

These facts suggest that if 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.

And yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming.

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

Because time is such a slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today.

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark

In other words, when your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency, and recency do.

It isn’t surprising, then, that we consider our own views credible when they are based on observable facts but not when they are based on wishes, wants, and fancies.

the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.

When facts challenge our favored conclusion, we scrutinize them more carefully and subject them to more rigorous analysis.

When we expose ourselves to favorable facts, notice and remember favorable facts, and hold favorable facts to a fairly low standard of proof, we are generally no more aware of our subterfuge than Osten was of his.

Like so many things, getting jilted is more painful in prospect and more rosy in retrospect.

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. But it doesn’t do this every time we feel the slightest tingle of sadness, jealousy, anger, or frustration.

It would be worse. At first. But if intense suffering triggers the psychological immune system and mild suffering does not, then over time you should be more likely to generate a positive view of an insult that was directed at you (“Felicia called me a pea-brain . . . boy, she can really crack me up sometimes”) than one that was directed at your cousin (“Felicia called Cousin Dwayne a pea-brain . . . I mean, she’s right, of course, but it wasn’t very nice of her to say”). The irony is that you may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.

Apparently, people are not aware of the fact that their defenses are more likely to be triggered by intense than mild suffering, thus they mispredict their own emotional reactions to misfortunes of different sizes.

When the experience we are having is not the experience we want to be having, our first reaction is to go out and have a different one,

It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience,

We just can’t make the best of a fate until it is inescapably, inevitably, and irrevocably ours.

when experiences are unpleasant, we quickly move to explain them in ways that make us feel better

Explanations allow us to understand how and why an event happened, which immediately allows us to see how and why it might happen again.

Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.

Not only does our naïveté cause us to overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity, but it also leads us to take actions that may undermine the conspiracy.

We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can.

The processes by which we generate positive views are many: We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically.

We’ve seen how difficult it is to predict accurately our emotional reactions to future events because it is difficult to imagine them as they will happen, and difficult to imagine how we’ll think about them once they do.

We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won’t. Why don’t we learn to avoid these mistakes in the same way that we learn to avoid warm diapers? If practice and coaching can teach us to keep our pants dry, then why can’t they teach us to predict our emotional futures?

We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret.1 The trouble is that we often don’t remember them correctly.

In fact, infrequent or unusual experiences are often among the most memorable, which is why most Americans know precisely where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, but not on the morning of September 10.4

But because we don’t recognize the real reasons why these memories come quickly to mind, we mistakenly conclude that they are more common than they actually are.

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.

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

the average American moves more than six times,3 changes jobs more than ten times,4 and marries more than once,

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.

any belief—even a false belief—that increases communication has a good chance of being transmitted over and over again.

Some of our cultural wisdom about happiness looks suspiciously like a super-replicating false belief.

it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but once you’ve bought your way out of these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper.

It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances.

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.

MOST OF US MAKE at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it.

For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will.

When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

But foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there, or do that. There is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.