Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen.

The costs and benefits of freedom are clear—but alas, they are not equally clear: We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine.

Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer, and move on to the next one; but if an event defies explanation, it becomes a mystery or a conundrum—and if there’s one thing we all know about mysterious conundrums, it is that they generally refuse to stay in the back of our minds.

In both cases, students chose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery—despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness.

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?

They think of our experience as a form of wealth because they assume it allows us to avoid making the same mistake twice—and sometimes it does. There are a few experiences that those of us who are filthy rich with it just don’t repeat, and bathing a cat while drinking peppermint schnapps comes to mind for reasons I’d rather not discuss right now.

The k-word puzzle works because we naturally (but incorrectly) assume that things that come easily to mind are things we have frequently encountered.

Most of us can bring to mind memories of riding a bicycle more easily than we can bring to mind memories of riding a yak, hence we correctly conclude that we’ve ridden more bikes than yaks in the past. This would be impeccable logic—except for the fact that the frequency with which we’ve had an experience is not the only determinant of the ease with which we remember it.

Memory’s fetish for endings explains why women often remember childbirth as less painful than it actually was,12 and why couples whose relationships have gone sour remember that they were never really happy in the first place.

If humanity is a living library of information about what it feels like to do just about anything that can be done, then why do the people with the library cards make so many bad decisions?

False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.

Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.

My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.

We don’t always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we’re doing it for unique reasons.

We recognize that our decisions are influenced by social norms (“I was too embarrassed to raise my hand in class even though I was terribly confused”), but fail to recognize that others’ decisions were similarly influenced (“No one else raised a hand because no one else was as confused as I was”).36

There is a difference between making love and reading about it, and it is the same difference that distinguishes our knowledge of our own mental lives from our knowledge of everyone else’s.

If you spent all day sorting grapes into different shapes, colors, and kinds, you’d become one of those annoying grapeophiles who talks endlessly about the nuances of flavor and the permutations of texture. You’d come to think of grapes as infinitely varied, and you’d forget that almost all of the really important information about a grape can be deduced from the simple fact of its grapehood.

For instance, people often value things more after they own them than before, they often value things more when they are imminent than distant, they are often hurt more by small losses than by large ones, they often imagine that the pain of losing something is greater than the pleasure of getting it, and so on—and on and on and on.