In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert focuses on errors in our thinking that prevent us from feeling and predicting our own happiness. It also highlights the traps we fall into seeking things that we think will make us happy, but instead leads to more unhappiness.
The book focuses on the Cognitive Psychology behind emotions and happiness and is divided into four parts that represent challenges to happiness: Prospection, Subjectivity, Realism, Presentism, Rationalization and Corrigibility.
We are bad at accurately predicting our future happiness and use how we presently feel to imagine how we would feel in the future. When we think about past events, we fill in thoughts and sensations that make the situation pleasant, but at times goes against reality. We have more control over our attitude and perception of events. But control is another problem as our brain wants to control the experiences we have, when some things are just out of our control.
Reading this will not magically make you happier, it's made to bring awareness and grant you some knowledge so that you can be better prepared to adjust your attitude, get out of your head and leverage the experience and support of other people who are more similar to you that you think.
Motivations to Read
Books like these tingle my curiosity, because it is a deeply curious book about a lot of different things we take for granted.
3 Reasons to Read
- How evolutionary psychology effects daily decision making.
- How different biases effect our judgement.
- Mistakes with our forecasting ability.
Notable Quotes
“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.”
“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”
“If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.”
Notes for this book are still being transcribed.
