Title Stumbling on Happiness

Author Daniel Gilbert

Year Published 2006

Kind of Book Clinical Psychology/Self-help

How strongly I recommend it 7/10 

My Impressions I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Gilbert is quite funny and delivers the current data on happiness in a very palatable way.

Date Read circa 2018

Practical Takeaways

  • Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.-

  • Be specific about the future you're imagining

  • Keep wherever you set the standard for the facts you agree with with the standard for facts that you disagree with

  • Make up to $50,000 a year and then stop thinking any more money will make you happier

  • Don't have children if your reason for doing it is personal happiness

  • Find someone who is currently experiencing the experience you are contemplating and ask them how they feel

 

Big Ideas

  • It makes no sense to talk about something 'mattering' without talking about feelings/emotion

 

  • Lobotomies caused patients to be in the eternal present ie: have an inability to think about the future

 

  • The need for Control is One of the fundamental human needs

 

  • When deciding how something will make us feel in the future we think about how that thing would make us feel NOW and then make a few mental calculations for how it might be different

 

  • We can't think of how something will feel in the future at the same time we are currently feeling something else

  • We can't feel how two things would feel at the same time

 

  • Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition

 

  • We Evolved to have a slight optimism bias

Because

  • If we didn't have a slight optimism bias we would be too depressed to function

However

  • If our optimism bias was too severe it would become a liability in our rosy delusions of the world might get us killed

 

  • We seek out opportunities to think about ourselves in positive ways

 

  • Facts are nothing more than conjectures that have met a certain standard of proof.

However

  •  If we set that standard for a fact to be fact high enough, then nothing can ever be proved

 

Surprising Facts

  • About 12% of our daily thoughts are about the future

 

Unknown Terms

Prospection: The act of looking forward in time or considering the future.

Frontal Lobotomy: chemical or mechanical destruction of parts of the frontal lobe 1930's Portuguese physician named Antonio Egas  Became a standard treatment for cases of anxiety and depression that resisted other forms of therapy

Happiness: 1.a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please 2.one of those words that means too many things to too many people and is thus often at risk of meaning nothing at all

Emotional Happiness: a feeling, an experience, a subjective state that has no referent in the physical world.

Eudaimonia: 1. literally translate to the human spirit.2. Human flourishing. 3. Life well lived

Realism: The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.

Presentism: The tendency for current experience to influence one's view of the past and the future. 2. Historians use the word to describe the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards.

Clarke's First law: Arthus C. Clarke's observation that "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Prefeeling: the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory.

Rationalization: The act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable.