Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert · 2006
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert reveals why we're so bad at predicting what will make us happy, and how the same imagination that lets us picture the future quietly distorts it. The good news: once you see the glitches, you can outsmart them and make better decisions.
Explains why our predictions about what will make us happy are systematically wrong, a key cognitive insight.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Stumbling on Happiness pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Stop trusting your gut about how happy a future event will make you. Your imagination systematically exaggerates emotional impact (the 'impact bias'), so big wins feel less amazing and setbacks feel far less devastating than you predict.
- Beware presentism: when you imagine the future, your brain quietly fills the gaps with how you feel right now. Never make a long-term decision (groceries while hungry, quitting a job while angry) in the grip of a strong present mood.
The other 5 — and the full 8-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 8 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Brain That Travels Through Time
- Happiness Is Slippery to Measure
- Your Memory and Senses Fill In the Blanks
- You Imagine the Future as a Copy of Now
- The Impact Bias: It's Never as Big as You Think
- The Psychological Immune System
- Why Comparison and Context Fool You
- Borrow Someone Else's Experience
Finish Stumbling on Happiness tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 8 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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