Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is getting many favorable reviews, including this at Amazon by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.
Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?
…I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that–and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.
Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt says:
One of the best books I have read lately is “Stumbling on Happiness” by Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard.
The book is about how what we think makes us happy and what really does make us happy are often two completely different things. It is based on decades of incredibly creative psychological studies. The conclusions are amazing but compelling. It is very readable, aimed at a general audience.