Stumbling on Happiness - By Daniel Gilbert
Date read: 2016-07-04How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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A scientitific approach into dissecting what it means to be "happy". Good insight into how our brain tricks us into being happy and the steps we can do to further discover true happiness.
My Notes
The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.
The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.
We feel anxiety when we anticipate that something bad will happen, and we plan by imagining how or actions will unfold over time. Planning requires that we peer into our futures, and anxiety is one of the reactions we may have when we do.
The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment was to stop thinking so much about the future. But thinking about the future can be pleasurable.
When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.
When people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur. Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.
Events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic.
Anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.
Our brains insist on simulating the future and they want to control the experiences we are about to have.
Happiness is used to indicate at least three related things: emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judge mental happiness.
Emotional happiness is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state, and thus it has no objective reverent in the physical world.
Experiences are like movies with several added dimensions, and were our brains to store the full-length feature films of our lives rather than their tidy descriptions, our heads would need to be several times larger.
We reduce our experiences to words such as happy, which barely do them justice but which are the things we can carry reliably and conveniently with us into the future.
Once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.
Experience stretching - not knowing what we're missing can mean that we are truly happy under circumstances that would not allow us to be happy once we have experienced the missing thing. It does not mean that those who don't know what they're missing are less happy than those who have it.
All claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view - from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience.
People can be wrong about what they are feeling.
Numbfeel - to be happy, sad, bored, or curious, and not know it.
There will never be a happy enter - a perfectly reliable instrument that allows an observer to measure with complex accuracy the characteristics of another person's subjective experience so that the measurement can be taken, recorded, and compared with another.
Of all the flawed measures of subjective experience that we can take, the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual is the least flawed.
Imperfections in measurement are always a problem, but they are a devastating problem only when we don't recognize them.
More is not just more - it is sometimes other - than less. As in the magic of large numbers.
If we ask enough people the same question, the average answer will be a roughly accurate index of the average experience.
Information acquired after an event alters memory of the event.
The act of remembering involves "filling in" details that were not actually stored. We generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.
Even as adults our perceptions are characterized by an initial moment of realism.
We believe what we see, and then we I believe it when we have to.
When people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of imagination.
When we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind's eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.
The misses are crucial to determining what kinds of inferences we can legitimately draw from the hits.
When we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternative, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes.
We fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.
It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention-difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering-and that is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.
When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.
When scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present.
Prefeeling allowed nonthinkers to predict their future satisfaction more accurately than thinkers did.
What we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what's happening in the present.
Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderful was wanes with repetition.
Time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don't need the other. When episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary-it can actually be costly.
Because we naturally use our present feelings as a starting point when we attempt to predict our future feelings, we expect our future to feel a bit more like our present than it actually will.
Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.
If we want to predict how something will make us feel in the future, we must consider the kind of comparison we will be making in the future and not the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present.
Negative events do affect us, but they generally don't affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.
People are quite adept at finding a positive way to view things once those things become their own.
A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it.
People intuitively lean toward asking the questions that are most likely to elicit the answers they want to hear. And when they hear those answers, they tend to believe what they've nudged others to say.
For positive views to be credible, they must be based on facts that we believe we have come upon honestly. We accomplish this by unconsciously cooking the facts and then consciously consuming them.
It is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.
Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures.
You may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.
We are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we're stuck with than of the things we're not.
Explanation rob events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.
Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness.
We choose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery-despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty have been shown to diminish happiness.
We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret. The trouble is that we often don't remember them correctly.
We naturally (but incorrectly) assume that things that come easily to mind are things we have frequently encountered.
The fact that the least likely experience is often the most likely memory can wreak havoc with our ability to predict future experiences.
Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.
We show a pronounced tendency to recall the items at the end of the series far better than the items at the beginning or in the middle.
Our brains use facts and theories to make guesses about past events, and so too do they use facts and theories to make guesses about past feelings. Because feelings do not leave behind the same kind of facts that presidential elections and ancient civilizations do, our brains must rely even more heavily on theories to construct memories of how we once felt. When those theories are wrong, we end up misremembering our own emotions.
Any belief-even a false belief-that increases communication has a good chance of being transmitted over and over again.
The production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth.
If you believe that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel.
Imagination's first shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us. They should have abandoned imagination altogether.
Imagination's second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future.
Imagination's third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen-in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better.
When people are deprived of the information that imagination requires and are thus forces to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings, which suggests that the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.
We don't always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique.
Even if we aren't special, the way we know ourselves is.
One reason why we seem so special is that we learn about ourselves in such a special way. We enjoy thinking of ourselves as special.
Because we value uniqueness, it isn't surprising that we tend to overestimate it.
We tend to overestimate everyone's uniqueness-that is, we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually are.
Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates.