Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts. You are a very fine person, I’m sure. But you are a very bad wizard.

when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed—and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize.

The misses are crucial to determining what kinds of inferences we can legitimately draw from the hits.

we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention—difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering—and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.

And yet, when sighted people imagine being blind, they fail to imagine all the other things that such a life might be about, hence they mispredict how satisfying such a life can be.

When volunteers are asked to “imagine a good day,” they imagine a greater variety of events if the good day is tomorrow than if the good day is a year later.23

Underestimating the novelty of the future is a time-honored tradition.

but what’s important to notice for our purposes is that in each of these instances, people misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did, and said what they now think, do, and say.11

These findings tell us something important about how the brain imagines, namely, that it enlists the aid of its sensory areas when it wants to imagine the sensible features of the world.

If mental images of rapid breathing and flailing mailbags induce pangs of jealousy and waves of anger, then we should expect a real infidelity to do so with even greater swiftness and reliability.

Indeed, when people are prevented from feeling emotion in the present, they become temporarily unable to predict how they will feel in the future.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.27 Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No thanks, I’ll just sit here in the dark.

But from the depressed person’s point of view, all the flailing makes perfectly good sense because when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.

But rather than recognizing that this is the inevitable result of the Reality First policy, we mistakenly assume that the future event is the cause of the unhappiness we feel when we think about it. Our

we all put the past someplace—and the future someplace

In other words, variety made people less happy, not more.

Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.

When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Marketers, politicians, and other agents of influence know about our obsession with relative magnitudes and routinely turn it to their own advantage.

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 same principle explains why we love new things when we buy them and then stop loving them shortly thereafter.

In short, the comparisons we make have a profound impact on our feelings, and when we fail to recognize that the comparisons we are making today are not the comparisons we will make tomorrow, we predictably underestimate how differently we will feel in the future.

they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.12 Able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again because able-bodied people underestimate how happy disabled people are.

because while rats and pigeons may respond to stimuli as they are presented in the world, people respond to stimuli as they are represented in the mind.

Studies such as these suggest that people are quite adept at finding a positive way to view things once those things become their own.

That’s why people seek opportunities to think about themselves in positive ways but routinely reject opportunities to think about themselves in unrealistically positive ways.

Studies show that people intuitively lean toward asking the questions that are most likely to elicit the answers they want to hear.

press was biased against their side.45 Alas, the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.

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.

Second, deliberate attempts to cook the facts are so transparent that they make us feel cheap.

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

time. Our most consequential choices—whether to marry, have children, buy a house, enter a profession, move abroad—are often shaped by how we imagine our future regrets (“Oh no, I forgot to have a baby!”). Regret is an emotion we feel when we blame ourselves for unfortunate outcomes that might have been prevented had we only behaved differently in the past, and because that emotion is decidedly unpleasant, our behavior in the present is often designed to preclude it.

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

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

We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine.31

Our relentless desire to explain everything that happens may well distinguish us from fruit flies, but it can also kill our buzz.

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 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?

Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread

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 The

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.

we can spend hours enjoying the memory of an experience that lasted just a few seconds, and if memories tend to overemphasize endings, then why not endure a little extra pain in order to have a memory that is a little less painful?16

Apparently students have the same theory, because research shows that when students do well on an exam, they remember feeling more anxious before the exam than they actually felt, and when students do poorly on an exam, they remember feeling less anxious before the exam than they actually felt.24

We don’t just treasure our memories; we are our memories.

And yet, the average American moves more than six times,3 changes jobs more than ten times,4 and marries more than once,5 which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor choices.

Do we listen too well when others speak, or do we not listen well enough? As we shall see, the answer to that question is yes.

The same logic can explain the transmission of beliefs. If a particular belief has some property that facilitates its own transmission, then that belief tends to be held by an increasing number of minds.

In this case, the means of transmission is not sex but communication, and thus any belief—even a false belief—that increases communication has a good chance of being transmitted over and over again.