Stumbling on Happiness

I’ve just finished reading the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.  I’ve been reading this book since last December, when I purchased it in the New Jersey airport on my way to Brussels.  For some reason, I can’t resist buying books in airports.  I bought two today.

I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to get through this book, because it is both fascinating and hilarious.  The book discusses why we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy, as well as how inaccurate we are at predicting how much happiness (or sadness) a future event will bring us.

Basically, we are bad at predicting our future happiness because we use our imagination and memory to make the prediction, and imagination and memory have three basic flaws:

1. Imagination tends to fill in and leave out details (inaccurately) without us realizing it.
2. Imagination tends to project the present onto the future, thereby filling in gaps with information it borrows from the present.
3. Imagination fails to recognize that things will look different once they happen — in particular, bad things doen’t look quite as bad once they actually happen.

Studies repeatedly show that we are very bad at predicting our future happiness when we rely on our imaginations.  However, we are very good at predicting future happiness when we ask other people who have achieved our desired future states (that guy already bought the Porsche, I’ll ask him) and use the feelings of those people as a predictor of our own happiness when that future state is achieved.  And yet, we insist on not doing this.  I bet you can guess why.  Because we believe that we are so unique, that someone else’s satisfaction with something cannot possible be a reliable predictor of our own.

You really have to read the book just to get some of the insights that the author illustrates so well.  Why do we insist on ordering a different meal than our dinner companion, when we really wanted the same thing, for example?

One subject the book talks about is habituation — basically, the boredom we feel when something is repetitive.  Since I found it pretty amusing, I’m going to include a small quote from the book here on the subject of habituation, which actually comes from the footnotes (for you David Foster Wallace fans, there’s quite a few of them¹).

“Male mammals who have mated to exhaustion can usually be induced to mate again with a novel female.  In fact, even breeding bulls whose sperm is collected by a machine show a greatly reduced time to ejaculation when the machied to which they’ve become habituated is moved to a novel location.”

The moral of the story being, if you’re bored with your sex life, try doing it on the kitchen table (or the bed if the kitchen table is your usual thing), before you try changing your partner (unless partner changing is your usual thing).

1.  In my Googling to find the David Foster Wallace reference, I found out that he died on September 12th of this year, apparently suicide.  The footnote is a shout out to DFW.  If you get a chance, check out “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”