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Stumbling on Happiness: Why the future won't feel the way you think it will by Daniel Gilbert Harper Reviewed by RITA CARTER This review first appeared in The Daily Mail WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA? The harder you try to steer yourself into happy times, the less likely you are to get there because your navigation system is hopelessly up the creek.. Human brains, says Gilbert, are constantly trying to predict what will make them happy, but they usually get it wrong. They make us believe, for example, that things which sound nice to us now will be just as nice in reality, and that awful events – divorce, illness, bereavement – will be devastating. Yet our feelings now about future events are actually a lousy guide to how we will feel when they actually happen The result is that we hold back from doing things we ought because we overrate the emotional effect of failure and error, and we fling ourselves into things we oughtn’t because we think the rewards will be greater than they are. Then, when we look back and ask ourselves where we took a wrong turn, we distort the view in such a way that we learn nothing from our mistakes. The consolation is that somewhere along the way, usually when we are not trying, we may “stumble” on happiness. Gilbert’s book explains how and why our brains delude, trick and misguide us into careering confidently down pathways that end in frustration, disappointment and confusion. As he himself makes clear, the book is not a manual on how to be happy. Gilbert seems to feel obliged, however, to offer some kind of practical guidance and, rather rashly, he promises at the start to end the book with “ a simple remedy “ for over-riding our brains’ distortions. This turns out to be a rather limp bit of advice which, as the author himself observes “you will almost certainly not accept”. Never mind – rather as happiness itself is to be found on the journey rather than at the destination, the joy of this book lies in the reading rather than in some spurious self-help pay-off. SO WHAT’S NEW? Nothing at all. The wisdom is old as the hills, and there are dozens of books that contain the science. But this one pulls it all together in the neatest, wittiest way possible.. HOW READER FRIENDLY IS IT? If you didn’t laugh at the parade of human folly laid out in this book, you’d have to cry, and Gilbert makes certain that you laugh. In fact, if you are like this reviewer you will giggle, splutter, guffaw and then possibly fall off your chair making weird wheezing noises. It is not a book to be read in public (or while consuming food.) BOFFIN-RATING Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is also the winner of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. OK? © Rita Carter 2007 - www.ritacarter.co.uk |
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