Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Stumbling on Happiness
    Unavailable
    Stumbling on Happiness
    Unavailable
    Stumbling on Happiness
    Ebook394 pages7 hours

    Stumbling on Happiness

    By Daniel Gilbert

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    In this fascinating and often hilarious work – winner of the Royal Society of Science Prize 2007 – pre-eminent psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows how – and why – the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy.

    We all want to be happy, but do we know how? When it comes to improving tomorrow at the expense of today, we're terrible at predicting how to please our future selves.

    In ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ Professor Daniel Gilbert combines psychology, neuroscience, economics and philosophy with irrepressible wit to describe how the human brain imagines its future – and how well (or badly) it predicts what it will enjoy. Revealing some of the amazing secrets of human motivation, he also answers thought-provoking questions – why do dining companions order different meals instead of getting what they want? Why are shoppers happier when they can't get refunds? And why are couples less satisfied after having children while insisting that their kids are a source of joy?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 1, 2009
    ISBN9780007330683
    Unavailable
    Stumbling on Happiness
    Author

    Daniel Gilbert

    Daniel Gilbert was born in 1957 and lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on affective forecasting examines the mistakes people make when they try to predict their emotional reactions to future events.

    Related to Stumbling on Happiness

    Personal Growth For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Is Everyone Depressed?

      May 22, 2020

      Is Everyone Depressed?
      9 min read

    • Article

      The World Of Writing

      Sep 7, 2023

      Given the recent controversy over Coutts bank closing Nigel Farage’s account, a letter by Spike Milligan dated 4 February 1968 reminds us that the failed politician is not the first famous person to take issue with the private bank. ‘How dare you rem

      6 min read

    • Article

      Editor-in-chief’s Letter

      May 26, 2021

      Dear Kelley, “Ever felt like you just had to do something? Like you just had no choice, that something was greater than you, and the passion was so intense there was no other possible outcome but to follow it blindly?” It’s 2008 and, girl, that ‘some

      6 min read

    • Article

      Choosing DISTRACTION

      Jun 22, 2020

      Choosing DISTRACTION
      8 min read

    • Article

      OPENINGS That Kill It

      Oct 30, 2019

      OPENINGS That Kill It
      7 min read

    • Article

      Spirit OF THE TIMES

      Jun 1, 2023

      Spirit OF THE TIMES
      6 min read

    • Article

      Isolation Blues Busters

      May 6, 2020

      Isolation Blues Busters
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Road-trip Long Game

      May 31, 2022

      The Road-trip Long Game
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Next chapter

      Aug 11, 2022

      92% of Brits enjoy reading, but 6.4 million can’t remember the last time they did for fun There’s nothing more satisfying than putting your phone away, turning off the TV and snuggling up with a cuppa to settle into a story. When you’re engrossed in

      3 min read

    • Article

      The “Good Enough” Life

      Apr 13, 2022

      The “Good Enough” Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      Surrender To Simplicity

      Dec 17, 2020

      Surrender To Simplicity
      4 min read

    • Article

      It’s Not Irrational to Party Like It’s 1999

      Nov 17, 2021

      Must we always follow reason? Do I need a rational argument for why I should fall in love, cherish my children, enjoy the pleasures of life? Isn’t it sometimes OK to go crazy, to be silly, to stop making sense? If rationality is so great, why do we a

      9 min read

    • Article

      21 for 2021

      Jan 7, 2021

      21 for 2021
      6 min read

    • Article

      Winning Letter

      Feb 3, 2023

      WHAT’S your favourite love story? Or your best memory with your significant other? Do you remember the first time you felt that special kind of flutter or felt weak at the knees? And how it felt when you decided this is the one? I know Valentine’s Da

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Real Life Of A Romance Writer

      Jun 19, 2019

      The Real Life Of A Romance Writer
      4 min read

    • Article

      The way TO WIN PART ONE

      Dec 7, 2023

      There’s something special about short story competitions. They’re great fun to enter and if you’re named as a prize winner, there’s no feeling quite like it.Many competitions have cash prizes and, of course, there’s the prestige that’s associated wit

      6 min read

    • Article

      Fatal Distraction

      Jun 5, 2022

      Fatal Distraction
      13 min read

    • Article

      Numbers Add Up

      Jun 2, 2022

      Numbers Add Up
      3 min read

    • Article

      Getting Creative With Reality

      Oct 1, 2020

      What do H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, Notes on a Small Island by Bill Bryson and Tall Stories and Wee Tales by Billy Connolly have in common? They all belong to the increasingly popular genre of creative non-fiction writing. When creative non-fic

      6 min read

    • Article

      LeTteR BocKS

      Jun 24, 2021

      SCIENTISTS say that in the future, all meals will be in the form of a pill. Let’s hope they are right, and they don’t develop them in the form of a suppository. I think that would make dining out a most unpleasant experience. Umberto Coaltit, Hull YO

      13 min read

    • Article

      A Truthteller’s Toolkit

      Apr 25, 2020

      Once upon a time, a writer might contact an agent and confess their desire to publish an essay collection. And once upon a time, an agent might have resisted an urge to laugh in the writer’s face. As a form, essays had fallen out of favor, hard, and

      8 min read

    • Article

      Truth And Consequences

      Sep 18, 2019

      Truth And Consequences
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Stumbling on Happiness

    4/5

    973 ratings60 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This is an enjoyable book, at times laugh-aloud funny, but always serious. The topics he covers have been covered before, but I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading about them so much. Gilbert states that we often don't really know what makes us happy; that we often do things believing they will make us happy, but we misjudge because we base our future on the memories of our past. Often, those memories are unreliable. These thoughts aren't new, but the way Gilbert presents them is and it is worth the laughs you'll get to read them.It did slow down a little toward the end, the density of the information building, but Gilbert does a good job of keeping it accessible and fun.
    • 3/5
      As a book, I didn't expect this to have cutting-edge research. As a popular book, I didn't expect it to be dry and technical.

      It met both of these criteria, and I can't honestly say that I was disappointed with it. It's written in an entertaining if slightly condescending style. Most of the material was not new to me—I'd done a lot of reading online about these topics already.

      It did stimulate a lot of interesting thoughts during a week when I felt more like reading books than blog posts, although I'm not sure if any of them stuck. However, I can't help but feel that it should be possible to give more information about the actual studies and let the reader make up their own mind about what conclusions are warranted, even in a popular science book. There is little mention of how strong an effect is or whether there are other possible explanations.

      The big secret advice at the end is to take an outside view—that is, assume you aren't special and are in fact equal to the statistical average of other people. (The author describes this as advice almost no one will take, even though it would make them more accurate.) Fair enough; many people probably haven't really considered the outside view. But the lack of accommodation for actual knowledge of one's own differences from the statistical average make the advice seem extreme, and I fear will lead readers to reject it wholesale.

      I don't know of a better book, so I can't say reading this is a bad idea for someone who's not familiar with the research suggesting we make systematic errors in forecasting what will make us happy. Just be aware of some of the pitfalls.
    • 4/5
      I can never predict my future correctly, looking back past makes me believe it's true, sad and fun at the same time
    • 5/5
      Extensive research + superb blend of academic theory & real-life applications+ sense of humour. This will probably be one of those books I look back on and say 'it changed my beliefs on how much I thought I know myself, and the direction I want to take my life in'. Even the diverse subject matter- which could have meandered- stays focused and coherent throughout the book. Highly recommended!
    • 5/5
      packed with humor in comparison with a vast array of research and meaningful conclusions.
    • 3/5
      When you get to the end of the book, it seems like there is no conclusion. It kind of leaves you hanging in the air. There is a lot of valuable information, but there should be a disclaimer at the start to say there will be no answer to the question: of how to be happy. You are correct; you pointed the problems out very nicely but did not answer how to solve them. Yes, human behavior is very tricky, but I was expecting some practical advice, at least. It seems like there should be a book two coming. :)
    • 2/5
      I just could not listen to this book anymore. I got to about 40% done and just couldn't do it. I'm not sure what the 5 star people read/heard in the book but I found it a little boring and not really helpful for me. Maybe I wasn't in the mood. Who knows. It was a snooze for me.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      An interesting look at what makes us happy by an author who concludes that the reason happiness is so difficult to attain is that it's practically impossible to define. When you don't know what you are looking for, how do you know when you've found it?
    • 3/5
      Might be pretty good if it's the first book you read on this subject.It didn't tell me much I didn't know yet, and found it annoying that sometimes he is being very scientific and skeptical of the things we all believe about ourselves, while at other times he completely relies on "common sense".
    • 4/5
      It only took me years to get thru this book! It was very interesting and took thought in nearly every sentence. I would read for a while and then put it down to read something more fun. Very thought provoking. I should read it again to absorb the information deeper. (but I probably won't)
    • 3/5
      Whew. Great content and ideas but holy crap does the author love to beat a dead horse, particularly with metaphors. Painful at points. Also, reading some of the obscure and silly experiments that psychologists do makes me question what the heck they are doing with their time...
    • 2/5
      I've tried to get through this book three different times, and I just can't. I don't like Gilbert's writing style. He spends too much time trying to be amusing; it obscures any meaningful content that might be there.
    • 5/5
      I heard about this book on the Freakonomics podcast and was instantly intrigued. This is not a self-help book on how to be happy - it’s a rigorous scientific examination of why we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. And it’s extremely thought-provoking!Gilbert is a fast talker, but otherwise he does an excellent job with the audio narration. He presents compelling evidence to support his ideas, and I was totally with him, point for point, until the very end, when he tries to argue that the drive to accumulate wealth and have kids is a sort of self-propagating social conspiracy basically unrelated to personal happiness. I couldn’t really get on board with that, but it’s a side argument that’s not critical to the main idea.But whether you buy all of Gilbert’s arguments or not, Stumbling on Happiness is still a really interesting read, and I guarantee that you will find something in it that relates to your own experiences in some way. It’s not a long book, but it’s dense with ideas. Humor interspersed throughout keeps it from getting dry. Overall, this is a fascinating listen that I’m very glad I came across and will definitely be chewing over for a while.
    • 5/5
      I literally stumbled on this book whilst browsing the library shelf and happily so! It may sound like a self-help book but thats precisely what its not.. its a primer with mix of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy & behavioral economics. Happiness is a subjective experience, hence measurement via a significantly large sample size is the only way to arrive at some conclusions of how to derive it - the book then goes onto a research-backed method of negating aspects that are strongly ingrained and offering a final single solution to understand how to best get a measure of happiness. From the filling-in & leaving-out tricks that our brain plays to the liberties that imagination takes without telling us about doing so.. its a mind-boggling start to the book! The author then goes on to describe how imagination leans on perception, given its own limitation to transcend boundaries of the present time, place and circumstances - what we imagine as the future is often a response to whats happening in the present; our present thoughts & feelings exert a strong influence on the way we think we'll feel later. It gets further complicated when our brain gets busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it - we build a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in the same way that the physical immune system defends the body. To ensure our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eyes see and to ensure our views are positive, our eyes look for what our brain wants; conspiring against us in a secretive way! We are mor
    • 4/5
      Why we don’t always judge correctly what’ll make us happy, from a psychology & brain wiring perspective. Interesting, and very entertainingly written. I quibble a bit with the author’s conclusion that the best way to figure out whether something will make you happy is to look at whether it makes other people happy — learning a Bulgarian dance makes me pretty darn happy, but most people find that pretty tedious — but the basic concept makes sense.
    • 3/5
      Cognitive biases have become well-trodden ground, but I enjoyed Gilbert's sense of humor.
    • 3/5
      This is a quantification of the psychology of happiness. The author made the effort to make it readable and relatable but it didn’t work. It did not make me happy. I do not recommend unless you are hard core into psych.
    • 5/5
      I really liked this book. I was expecting self-help genre writing, actually, based on the title and cover, so I was pleased to discover that this is more of a cognitive psychology science book, geared towards a broader audience but not too badly dumbed down.
      This book covers how we define happiness, how we know if/when we are happy, and how we succeed or fail at predicting what we should choose to make ourselves happy. It also offers suggestions about how we might be more successful at making choices that will lead to more happiness, and certainly helps to make sense of a lot of bizarre human behavior we are probably all so used to that we forget how bizarre it really is.
      I won my copy of this book free through a Goodreads giveaway.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This book sited a lot of the same examples as The Paradox of Choice, so much so that at times it felt like The Paradox of Choice was used as a primary resource in writing this book.
    • 4/5
      Professor Daniel Gilbert discusses why it is so difficult to correctly imagine the future, especially our emotional futures. In personal terms: why are we so bad at figuring out what makes us happy? Professor Gilbert argues that we are misled by several useful tricks that our brains use to construct our world. First, the brain only stores the highlights of emotions, then fills in the details to construct memories. This leads to considerable distortion in our memories, particularly for emotional experiences. Second, even in the present, we fail to notice the ordinary, the everyday, or whatever might be missing. It’s rather like realizing how important something is only when it’s gone. Third, our ability to imagine the future is limited by our faulty memories, by the details our minds necessarily exclude, and by “presentism”, the tendency to assume that the future is going to look a whole lot like the present.Witty, accessible, Gilbert takes us on a surprising tour of our brains while showing them to be the marvelous constructors of our pasts and our presents. Unfortunately, they are not very good at imagining our futures due to their limitations. This is most true for our emotional experiences and explains why it is so difficult to stumble on happiness.
    • 4/5
      What we believe will make us happy will not necessarily make us happy. Moving to California, for example, is widely believed to result in a happier life, but research suggests we'd be better off staying in South Dakota and spending more time with family. Gilbert rounds up the best of the research on happiness and presents it to readers in an enjoyable book replete with witty anecdotes to illustrate ideas. Does money make us happy? Most people behave as though it will but, beyond the level of income requisite for survival, more income does not make us happier. We would be better off working less and having more friendships. If you distill the results of happiness research into principles for living, they bear a remarkable resemblance to many teachings of the great world religions. In a secular society, books like this play an important role by enlightening us rugged individualists as to why more stuff isn't helping. Derek Bok extends Gilbert's ideas into the political sphere in his book, The Politics of Happiness. What if public policy were to concern itself with happiness as a priority instead of focusing on guaranteeing the kind of economic freedom that is bound to result in misery for some and no additional happiness for it's main beneficiaries? I've found the implications of Gilbert's book as interesting as the book itself.
    • 4/5
      In the broader genre of psychology / sociology / statistics "why we make decisions" (Freakonomics, Nudge, Sway, Drunkard's Walk, Blunder, Black Swan, Predictably Irrational, Chances Are, Traffic, Critical Mass, Wisdom of Crowds, and all those annoying Malcolm Gladwell books), this one is a refreshingly well-written one that does weigh heavily on the psychology side of my rough genre description.I took a star off because the book (or maybe just me) lost steam as it progressed. The narrative has a somewhat compelling plot structure that aims to show us why imagination fails us, but the forced structure (with formal "summaries" -- what he calls "outlooks" I think -- at the end of chapters), takes something away from the experience. It's like watching a documentary mini-series of self-contained episodes rather than a single unified movie. So it is kind of uninspired. And it feels a bit more academic than most of the others in this genre.That said, I'd recommend this one over many of the others, simply because it is probably more well-written, thoughtful, and "big picture" than some of the others.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book. This is on my "Re-Read" list. Daniel Gilbert explains how we seek and achieve happiness, and sometimes why we don't. Even after horrific events happen to his - he explains how people adapt to whatever circumstances they find themselves in and find a "baseline" of happiness.Excellent book for people who want to understand why lottery winners are sometimes miserable and how trauma survivors can come to view their circumstances as "the best thing that could happen to them".Enlightening.
    • 4/5
      Why do humans often fail at making themselves happy? Gilbert answers with a great mixture of humor and psychology.
    • 5/5
      I'm so glad I "stumbled" upon this book. It's a fascinating look on how the brain works and our perceptions of the world. Although, it's possible I just THINK I really enjoyed it...
    • 3/5
      Gilbert's book is wry, funny and informative. My initial joy at finding such a book was muted as I read, finding little that I could relate to. Now, the point of the book is that the many cited studies show that everyone thinks better of themselves than they can justify, so perhaps I'm in that boat. In the end, though, I found myself frustrated by how little new knowledge I gained. True, the details behind the mechanics of thought, perception, judgement and analysis are fascinating, but only confirm what observant folks have been saying for years.A fun read, but unsatisfying.
    • 4/5
      Filled with research, written for mental health professionals but without jargon. Perfect for anyone who wants to KNOW how our minds work. A fun read too. Found myself chuckling out loud on a regular basis. Also, as a psychologist, found plenty of meat on the bone. Reviews of research well written and relevant. Universally recommended to ALL readers.
    • 3/5
      Central message: our minds trick us the same way our eyes trick us with visual illusions. And we are foolishly un-aware of the ways it tricks us. The rest of the book is basically a list of psychology experiments backed up by pretty horrible long-winded prose to explain how that applies to our daily lives, sprinkled with annoyingly "witty" jokes. His "wit" was not funny to me, but merely annoying, like someone trying really hard to counteract his innate boring-ness w/ strained jokes. While I did appreciate the science behind this book, I felt that his writing style was bloated and dull (even when the subject matter was so interesting). He seems to think that the more you repeat a thing that is self evident, the more interesting it becomes. Perhaps he also underestimates his reader's ability to get something after reading it a couple of times. He needs a good editor; this book could have been cut down to 150 pages (instead of 240 minus notes). I would recommend reading Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi instead, which is excellently written and researched, and covers a more satisfying aspect of Happiness. This book is still worth reading, though, and works as a good complement because it's nice to have some insight into how we trick ourselves (which Flow really doesn't cover). But this book tackles happiness in a most superficial way; it would be more fitting to say it tackles brain-illusions. It should be called "Brain Illusions: How the mind tricks you daily" instead of "Stumbling on Happiness", which is kind of a misnomer. Overall, Dan Gilbert could've afforded to be a little more ambitious and visionary with all this data.
    • 4/5
      Some interesting ideas on memory, perception and predicting happiness. But way too long with too many psychological studies. These studies are treated as more factual than they are. While I enjoyed his humor, it was a little overdone.
    • 4/5
      The author is incredibly funny and persuasive. He's also quite adept at using metaphor to explain complex ideas. I was annoyed at his depressing conclusions, which inferred that we're all chasing an elusive feeling, and the only way to scientifically know how to achieve it is to ask people who are currently experiencing what we want, which no one ever does. Clearly science doesn't include "instill hope for humanity" in its list of aims.