The key ideas

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert, 2006

Why do we so often get what we wanted and feel no happier? Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows how the imagination gets it wrong when it paints our future, and why it always gets it wrong in the same ways. This is not a guide to happiness. It explains why we stumble on it, and offers one reliable way to look ahead.

Who it is for

For anyone choosing a job, a city or a way of life who has noticed that the thing they wanted brings less joy than it promised. And for anyone curious about how the brain looks into the future.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

The sentence every psychologist writes

Daniel Gilbert jokes that psychologists have a custom. Once in their lives, each of them must write The Sentence, the one that begins: “The human being is the only animal that…” Some finish it with “uses language”, others with “makes tools”. Gilbert finishes it his own way: “thinks about the future”.

Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, gives a whole book to this ability. We picture tomorrow all the time: which job will make us glad, which city we will be happy in, who we should live with. And we choose by those pictures. Gilbert shows that the imagination gets things wrong, and not at random. It errs by the same rules every time.

The author warns from the start that this is not a guide to becoming happy. It is an account of what science knows about the brain that looks ahead, and of why we so rarely reach happiness by plan, and so often stumble on it instead.

Ahead are three traps of the imagination, a defence that works inside us unnoticed, and the one way of looking into the future that the author trusts.

When someone takes the wheel away

Why does the brain look ahead at all? Gilbert's answer: to be in control. If you know what is coming, you can shape how it turns out. And the feeling that you shape your own life brings joy all by itself. People love this feeling so much that they act as if they control even pure chance.

The saddest story about it took place in a nursing home. Researchers arranged for students to visit the residents regularly. Some residents decided for themselves when a visitor would come and how long they would stay. Others were given a schedule. Two months later, the first group was happier, healthier and more active, and needed less medication.

Then the study ended, and so did the visits. A few months later, a disproportionate number of the residents who had been given the choice had died. They had been handed control, grown used to it, and lost it when the study was over. As Gilbert sees it, losing control can be harder than never having it.

That is why we try so hard to see ahead. The question of the book is whether we really know what we will like once the future arrives.

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About the author

Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University who has spent years studying how people predict their future feelings. Stumbling on Happiness won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

All books by this author: Daniel Gilbert

Terms from the book

  • Louisiana
  • Beatles
  • Wright
  • Schappell: Lori and Reba Schappell, American sisters born joined at the head. Gilbert uses them as an example of happiness that is hard to understand from the outside.
  • Presentism: Gilbert's name for a mistake of the imagination: we carry today's feelings and circumstances into the future.
  • Habituation: The weakening of a response to something that repeats. It is why the joy of the same thing fades over time.
  • Bickham: Moreese Bickham, an American who spent 37 years in a Louisiana state prison. Gilbert quotes him saying he regrets nothing.
  • Speaker: The presiding officer of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the US Congress.
  • Best: Pete Best, the first permanent drummer of the Beatles. In 1962 he was replaced by Ringo Starr.
  • Starr: Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer, who joined the band in 1962 in place of Pete Best.
  • Psychological immune system: An image from the book, not a medical term: Gilbert's name for the mind's ability to find the bright side of what has happened and soften the blow.
  • Surrogation: Gilbert's word for a way of predicting your feelings: find someone who is already living through what you are only imagining, and ask how they feel.

All terms

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