Book of the Week: Stumbling on Happiness

14 Jun 2013

Stumbling on Happiness Happiness is hot field of research. If I had to do college over again, I would major in happiness and become a Chief Happiness Officer after getting my Happiness BS. I previously read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. Now it is time for Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. What’s happiness and what can I do to get more of it? Like everyone else, I’ve tried to pursue more happiness. It remains elusive. Everyone could use a little more happiness in their lives. Have you ever lusted after something and pictured yourself with the object of your lust, only to find yourself still unhappy? If thinking about the future can be pleasurable, then it would be a good idea to delay gratification in order to enjoy the wait and contemplation. What are we doing while we are waiting? We are picturing ourselves in the future. Am I any happier being able to buy things on a whim rather than saving money for a period of time to finally be able to purchase the item? How much stuff do we actually use? Your thoughts about the future and what actually happens, differs. Imagination can be a very good or a very bad thing. The flip side of an active imagination is worrying about the future, because we project all the negative things that could occur. Control Like we learned in previous books, control makes people happy. Some of the research conducted to figure this out resulted in the deaths of elderly people. Old people are happier when they can decide the time visitors come and chat. People should talk to more old people. They are dying, because people aren’t talking to them. Lotteries use the illusion of control to trick you. People think they have a higher chance of winning a lottery, because they can pick the numbers. People won’t buy a raffle with the same probabilities. What is Happiness? People are happy because they don’t know what they are missing out on. Think about Apple products. People are content with their current iDevices until the next new thing gets announced. People aren’t as happy with what they have if they know something better exists. Going to see a movie with your girlfriend in college can bring you as much happiness as buying a Porsche during your midlife crisis. Your parents playing with sticks and stones when they were little were probably as happy as your kids playing video games now. People don’t know their own hearts. Finding your passion makes you happy, but most people don’t know their passion, so they can’t predict what would make them happy. Happiness may be different for different people. This makes it hard to define and quantify happiness. Memory How our memory works is used as a guide to explain how we perceive happiness. Our memory sucks. Experiments have shown that information after an event can alter our memories of the event. This is how magic works. Our brain tries to connect the dots. Magic is magical, because it clashes with how we connect the dots. We don’t see what’s between the dots. What We Don’t See In choosing something to accept, we look for the best positive features. To choose what to reject, we choose the worst negative features. We don’t think about what’s missing. This is why we an inability to predict an outlier. Machine learning algorithms also suffer from this defect, because they do their predictions based on what has been observed in the past. Our Imagination is limited by current experiences. Diverse experiences should lead to a better imagination. Predictably Irrational Here are some points that were also raised in Predictably Irrational.

After reading several books along these topics, it looks like everyone reads the same psychology papers. I wonder if these research papers actually say what these authors say they say. How Do I know If I’ll Be Happy? The ending is anti-climatic. If you want to know if you’ll be happy doing something your best bet is to ask someone who has done it. If you’re not happy now, you never will be. Money Money is weird thing.

So once we’ve earned as much money as we can actually enjoy, we quit working and enjoy it, right? Wrong. People in wealthy countries generally work long and hard to earn more money than they can ever derive pleasure from. - Daniel Gilbert

This is the great delusion that keeps the economy running. The question that I need to answer another day is what is enough money? Purchase Stumbling on Happiness from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.