Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives—to

So why do they end up with attics

and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing, or useless?

have never before written The Sentence, but I’d like to do so now, with you as my witness. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.

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,

Rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let’s say that they are nexting.

Small children cannot say what they want to be later because they don’t really understand what later means.

At some point between our high chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about later.8

“No prefrontal symptom has been reported more consistently than the inability to plan.

We feel anxiety when we anticipate that something bad will happen, and we plan by imagining how our actions will unfold over time.

A permanent present—what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now,

When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.26

Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit.

Americans of all ages expect their futures to be an improvement on their presents,

First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.

The second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.

In short, we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.

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.

The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control—not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself.

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.

People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their ticket,44 and they feel more confident that they will win a dice toss if they can throw the dice themselves.45

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

but they’re not” or the ever popular “They don’t know what happiness really is” (usually spoken as if we do).

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.

Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy.

What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.

It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.11

In short, emotional happiness is fine for pigs, but it is a goal unworthy of creatures as sophisticated and capable as we.

The ancient Athenian legislator Solon suggested that one could not say that a person was happy until the person’s life had ended because happiness is the result of living up to one’s potential—and how can we make such a judgment until we see how the whole thing turns out?

Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.

How can we tell whether subjective emotional experiences are different or the same? The truth is that we can’t—no

Experiences are like movies with several added dimensions, and were our brains to store the full-length feature films of our lives rather than their tidy descriptions, our heads would need to be several times larger.

By that reasoning, we should all follow Solon’s advice and never say we are happy until we are dead because otherwise, if the real thing ever does come along, we will have used up the word and won’t have any way to tell the newspapers about it.

All of this means that when people have new experiences that lead them to claim that their language was squished—that they were not really happy even though they said so and thought so at the time—they can be mistaken. In other words, people can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.

Experience stretching is a bizarre phrase but not a bizarre idea. We often say of others who claim to be happy despite circumstances that we believe should preclude it that “they only think they’re happy because they don’t know what they’re missing.”

As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn’t a view from nowhere.

Apparently, feelings that one interprets as fear in the presence of a sheer drop may be interpreted as lust in the presence of a sheer blouse—which is simply to say that people can be wrong about what they are feeling.

Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event.

alexithymia, which literally means “absence of words to describe emotional states.”

If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others.

War, peace, art, money, marriage, birth, death, disease, religion—these are just a few of the Really Big Topics over which oceans of blood and ink have been spilled, but they are really big topics for one reason alone: Each is a powerful source of human emotion. If they didn’t make us feel uplifted, desperate, thankful, and hopeless, we would keep all that ink and blood to ourselves.

And the thing that’s wrong with both of us is that we make a systematic set of errors when we try to imagine “what it would feel like if.”

Our lives may not always turn out as we wish or as we plan, but we are confident that if they had, then our happiness would have been unbounded and our sorrows thin and fleeting.

This general finding—that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event—has

have tried to convince you that things are not always as they appear. Now let me try to convince you that you can’t help but believe that they are.

Kant’s new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process

but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. “The

Experiments such as these suggest that we do not outgrow realism so much as we learn to outfox