Stumbling on Happiness

"How our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy in the future."

"This book on the science of happiness and our flawed predictions about it fits Derek Sivers's interest in practical philosophy and understanding human behavior. It aligns with his focus on actionable insights for living a better life."

"Gilbert's exploration of how we mispredict what makes us happy aligns with Mark Manson's interest in challenging conventional wisdom about well-being and self-improvement. It's an expected read for someone exploring the often-flawed pursuit of happiness."

"Dan Gilbert, a dear friend of mine at Harvard, is the best writer in our field and one of our greatest thinkers. He is extremely creative and insightful. Stumbling on Happiness describes a program of research that he launched, comparing people’s beliefs about what’s gonna make them happy with what actually makes them happy. We psychologists care a lot about people’s beliefs, expectations and attitudes because beliefs, expectations and attitudes that precede action often cause it. Our beliefs and expectations are often mistaken and rarely well-calibrated. Dan’s book is a really entertaining explanation of the psychology that drives our beliefs about happiness and how those beliefs depart from what actually brings us happiness. The big things are probably no surprise, in the abstract. We don’t always make choices that lead us to meaningful work. Money matters to happiness, beyond a low threshold, less than we think. Folks who are already making quite a bit of money and who work overtime to make more, make themselves miserable sometimes. In contrast, doing stuff that you think is valuable is a key to happiness. While work is a critical determinant for well-being, data shows that the strength of our personal connections is more important. The other happiness hack is enhancing the quality of our social connections. Getting along with family and friends and loved ones, having positive connections with acquaintances and even with strangers, leads to happiness. Connecting with others in meaningful ways is what really brings out happiness."

"Dan Gilbert’s book is one of the first books that appeared on happiness, more than 10 years ago. It’s received many accolades, as it should: It’s a fantastic read. It’s an easy read, so it’s deceptive in that you might begin thinking, ‘oh, this is a piece of fluff’ – but it’s not. It takes on some pretty important scientific and philosophical topics that are usually presented in a complex and difficult way. Dan’s book is one of the best popular psychology books I think that’s been written in the last decade or so. Dan writes about scientific evidence in a very accessible way. And he’s just totally hysterical. He is a really, really funny guy, if you’ve ever seen any interviews with him – and that voice comes out in his book. At the same time, he manages to communicate these incredibly powerful and important ideas in a straightforward, understandable way. “Juries’ decisions largely rest on whether or not the defendants express remorse in an American way” One of the ideas in this book is that minds are predictive, not reactive. It feels to us like we just react to the things that are happening to us, but in fact our brains are constantly guessing what’s going to happen in the next moment. Dan’s book was one of the first books that really took on this idea of prediction – which is, I would say, one of the great innovations in the last decade or two of neuroscience research. The book describes prediction in very straightforward terms, and he’s not talking about the neuroscience here, he’s really just talking about psychology, just the mind. There are two other books, The Predictive Mind , and Surfing Uncertainty , which take on some of these ideas in a little bit more detail. Dan’s book did it with respect to happiness, and one of his main points is that we believe that we understand what makes us happy, and that we make predictions about what’s going to make us happy. We usually follow those beliefs, and we’re often wrong. He points this out in really funny, poignant, and I think deep and important ways. There’s really no aspect of your life where it isn’t relevant. It’s relevant in classrooms, in courtrooms, in boardrooms, in bedrooms, every aspect of your life. You experience emotions, you perceive emotions, this is the currency of a human life. Say you believe that faces display emotion, and you can read emotion in someone’s facial movements – we call them expressions, right? As if something is being expressed the way that you would read words on a page. Well it turns out actually you don’t, nobody does. If that’s what you believe, though, then it can wreak havoc in your life, and it can cost people their lives. In the book, and in my TED talk , I gave this example: to get a fair trial, a jury and a judge have to know the heart and mind of a defendant. How do you know the heart and mind of a defendant? Well, people believe it is through their facial movements. In the United States – the United States still has the death penalty in some states – juries are sometimes asked to make a decision between sentencing someone to life in prison, or to death. Their decision largely rests on whether or not the defendant express remorse in an American way, because people believe remorse is expressed universally. So someone might feel remorseful but not show it the right way and be sentenced to death. Someone might not feel remorseful but put on a good show and be sentenced to life in prison. That’s just one example of why we need a better, more scientific understanding of how emotions are made. There are many, many, many examples that I describe in my book. Another example is that anxiety has a particular expression that is distinct and unique. The consequence of that belief is that women are more likely to die from a heart attack after the age of 65 compared to men, because when they go to the hospital, physicians – and they themselves – believe they’re experiencing anxiety, and so they’re sent home instead of being given tests for an impending cardiac event. Then they have a heart attack and die. In fact, this happened to the mother of my publicist in the UK. There are lots of examples of how using the wrong theory of emotion can be really harmful to your life, and there are many, many examples of how using the right theory as a tool can actually help you live a more meaningful life, and a healthier life, and improve the lives of your children, and your co-workers, your colleagues, and friends."

"These are two books on positive psychology by two of the top researchers. They are very different books and they appeal to very different readers. The Gilbert book is just so much fun to read. He’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he’s just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster. He’s describing very good research that he’s done along with my colleague here at the University of Virginia, Tim Wilson. It’s a single big idea that is very, very important, which is that we make a lot of errors in our expectations of what will make us happy, and therefore we make a lot of errors in our choices. One of the things Gilbert looks at is consumer behaviour – for example, he was involved in a study where they asked people if they would want to be able to return a product or not. And of course most people would like the option of being able to return a television that they had bought. But those who elected for that option actually then enjoyed their product less – they were less committed to it. I think Americans in particular think they want a lot of options – but once you get above a small number, it actually cuts down on our enjoyment. That work was done especially by Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less . That is just such a good book…if I’d had six books, I would have included that one. But the main point that Gilbert is making is that in so many of our choices – in work, in love and consumer behaviour – the things we think we want before we make the choice, lead us to choices that make us worse off…"

"I liked this book because he went inside my brain. This is me operating against my brain, the inner stuff. He really hammers home the fact that you can’t predict what things are going to feel like in the future, and you’re not a good interpreter of the past. Essentially he writes that we’re prisoners of our minds and brains – and we think we’re so different from everyone else, but we’re not. I love this book because it made me laugh. I recognised so much of my own erroneous, crappy thinking. Yes! I do think like that! Damn! He says we think that having kids will make us happy, when, actually, when you look at it, people’s overall life happiness is dented by having kids and goes up when kids leave home. There’s one chapter I really liked, it was about the ‘Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye’. He shows how your brain puts stuff in and takes stuff out for you, starting with your optic nerve. Where your optic nerve is there’s a blind spot, but you never see a hole in your vision. Even though there is one. So your brain is filling in what actually isn’t there. The brain is putting in detail, at the same time as missing it out, which is why you can almost hit a car. The book is a reminder that happiness is complicated and complex and that our brains are flawed. We interpret things with hindsight, and we continually make bad choices. He goes into all the foibles and misinterpretations and the biases and the mistakes we make – and will continue to make."

"I don’t believe in the pursuit of happiness, and in my books I try never to mention that word. What I find most valuable in Daniel Gilbert’s book is the first part, where he writes about the comparatively new subject of ‘prospective psychology.’ The key idea is that what makes humans unique is our highly-developed capacity to think about the future. We tend to see ourselves as not unlike rats, creatures driven by the short-term reward centres in our brains. But what Gilbert does fantastically well is to argue that, actually, humans are better at long-term thinking than almost any other animal. A chimpanzee may strip off the leaves from a branch to make a tool to poke into a termite hole, but that chimp will never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. Yet this is exactly what humans do. So although we’re familiar with what I call the ‘marshmallow brain’, which focuses our attention on short-term rewards and makes it hard to resist treats for any length of time, there is also what I like to think of as the ‘acorn brain,’ which focuses our attention on long-term thinking, planning and strategising. We do plant seeds for posterity. That is how people built the pyramids, or the Great Wall of China. It’s how Joseph Bazalgette built the sewers of Victorian London. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Humans clearly have an extraordinary capacity to think long-term. We just don’t focus on it a lot and the message of Gilbert’s book for me is that we need to tell a new story about human nature. In the same way that, over the last 30 years, there’s been a shift in our understanding of human nature to acknowledge that we’re not just driven by individual egoism but are also cooperative and empathic creatures, so there’s another narrative which needs to be challenged. We’re not just short term marshmallow-snatchers; we are long term acorn planters! We’ve got this long-term part of our brain in our frontal lobe, particularly in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex of our brains. We’ve got to learn how to switch this thing on and use it!"

"My second choice is called Stumbling on Happiness , by a guy called Dan Gilbert. I just read this out of the blue but it really got me excited about where human nature, neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology meet. For a lot of people it was Nudge or Freakonomics that got them interested in that debate, but for me it was this, which is a beautifully written book. It shows that human beings are very bad at predicting what will make them happy, and, in fact, are even bad at describing what has made them happy in the past. So it is all about our cognitive frailties. The other book that is really good in that space is The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. In my last RSA annual lecture , I talked about how we really need people to understand what actually makes them happy, to understand that their desires are not the same as their needs, and that their appetites are not the same as their satisfactions. It’s a difficult argument because it can sound authoritarian or paternalistic but it is true. We are just not that good at knowing what is going to make us happy: I have made lots of mistakes in my life and so part of this is quite visceral for me. I wish I had known more about the real sources of contentment earlier. There are some things that you can only find out for yourself. I have a 17-year-old son. You can’t tell a 17-year-old boy what it is like to be a 40-year-old man because he doesn’t think he ever will be a 40-year-old man. But, having said that, I think you can tell them things that are so clear-cut that they stop and think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ You can say, for example, that buying stuff won’t make you happy for more than a few weeks, but what makes you happy is the way you feel about yourself, having hobbies and pastimes that you enjoy, friends that you enjoy. I also think that there are now lessons for all of us here about relationships. I think there are a series of big insights into the mistakes that people make and the way in which they manage their lives and their long-term relationships. Another book that influenced me a few years ago was by Sylvia Ann Hewlett called Baby Hunger – now this is really difficult territory. It was about how women put off having children and they comfort themselves by saying, ‘Oh the fertility treatment will be fine.’ They think that it will be OK to make a decision in their 40s, and then they are shocked to find that the success rate isn’t very high, and they end up not having children and feeling very miserable about it – feeling that they never really made that choice, but that it was a structured non-choice. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Arguably you should say to women that it’s much more fun to have children when you are younger because you’ve got more energy. Also, because our health and lifespan is much better, if you have children in your mid-20s then they are more or less self-sufficient by your mid-30s and you are still young enough to go out and have a party and a new career and have a great life. You are still young at 35. Instead, middle-class women who have a choice are encouraged to wait, but then they wait till they are in their mid-30s or later when it is all quite exhausting. And then of course it is also much worse for your career, because if you do take time out it is much harder to start again. The other thing is to realise it is worth sticking with relationships even when you think they are going wrong – because the short-term benefits you might get from a relationship ending, well, you be careful about that! Being alone is really, really bad for you. The price you pay for ending a long-term relationship is very high, so spend a bit more time at the beginning trying to get it right, try to recognise what it is that really makes a relationship work. Then once you have made a decision, try to stick with it. Now, in saying all those things I’m not calling for government to do anything, I’m not calling for shrill morality. I’m saying just explain to people what works and what doesn’t work so that they can make decisions that are more thoughtful. But there are other factors to consider as well, like the fact that we move around all the time when probably moving around is not very good for us. It is probably better to stay in one community if you can. Move around when you’re young, but actually it is probably quite important for children to grow up in one place. A whole lot of things that you learn from reading this literature have made us more thoughtful and possibly enable us to make better decisions. I quite agree, but understanding the implications might help you make decisions at the margins. And it leads us to think about new social conventions. Helen Wilkinson, when she was at Demos [the left-leaning think-tank] years ago, got into a lot of trouble with what I thought, in fact, was quite a cute argument. She said: ‘What about ten-year marriage contracts? What about saying, look we are going to make a commitment for ten years, have children, and then if at the end of the ten years it feels like it is not working for us any more we can split up in a very amicable way. It doesn’t feel like failure, we’ve done ten years, we’ve brought up our children together and we are both responsible for our children.’ Because the evidence is that if people split up without acrimony and they arrange things so that it is not inconvenient for the kids, it doesn’t have to do any harm at all. It is the acrimony and the turmoil that causes the problem. Helen Wilkinson was roundly attacked at the time but I’m not sure it is such a bad idea. Maybe these things are happening anyway, in gay relationships as well, that people are having children in the context of a relationship that is specifically about having those children."