Posted here originally two years ago today.
Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness
As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”
Trust me, too.
First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.
Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.
… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …
“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”
Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.
The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.
Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.