In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert shows how, despite our best efforts, we often fail to make choices that maximize our future happiness. He claims this is because our imaginations (our capacity to envision the future and speculate about what will make us happiest), our memories, and perceptions of the present are highly subjective and inaccurate. When we make choices about our futures based on this inaccurate information, those choices end up being sub-optimal and not conducive to our future happiness. It seems that we more often stumble on happiness than successfully create it.
In this guide, we’ll first describe why it’s hard to talk about happiness and how we can get around those hurdles to have a productive conversation about it. We’ll then outline Gilbert’s argument that we fabricate the past, present, and future, and that this fabricated view of the world leads us to make happiness-reducing choices about our future. We’ll conclude by showing how, despite our best intentions, we can’t ever overcome these errors in our decision-making.
According to Gilbert, a major reason why it’s difficult to talk about happiness is that you can’t describe it unless you reference something else. You can only talk about happiness by saying what makes you happy or what happiness is like. You cannot concretely say what happiness itself is.
For instance, you might explain to a friend that the happiness you felt when your fiancé proposed was like the feeling of awakening to a warm spring morning, or you might show them a picture of your delighted face in an engagement photo. You can’t, however, describe your happiness without these references.
(Shortform note: Gilbert contends that it’s difficult to describe happiness without using external comparisons. However, researchers have been able to discern with more ease what makes you happy: In the seminal Harvard Study of Adult Development, which tracked the health and well-being of 268 Harvard students over the course of 80 years, researchers found that having strong relationships was the greatest predictors of happiness.)
While Gilbert acknowledges the difficulty of discussing happiness, he claims you can still have a constructive discourse about it and presents two propositions for how to do this:
Though our attempts to discuss happiness will always be flawed, Gilbert writes that they will be least flawed if we rely on accounts of happiness by the people experiencing it—not by observers. Someone eating a cookie is better able to describe the happiness of eating a cookie than the person watching them eat a cookie, for instance.
(Shortform note: There are both advantages, as Gilbert points out, and disadvantages to using self-reported data on happiness—or, indeed, anything. Common disadvantages include people (particularly experiment subjects) giving responses they think are socially acceptable, rather than honest. For instance, when asked if a picture of a smiling baby makes them happy, a subject may answer “yes” because they feel that to be the acceptable response, even if it’s not true. Subjects can also interpret questions differently. For instance, one subject might interpret a question as being about their general level of happiness in life, while another subject might interpret the same question as referring to their present happiness.)
Additionally, Gilbert states that when large numbers of people report the same experience of happiness, we can take that experience to be reasonably accurate—this is commonly known as the law of large numbers. In formulating his principles about happiness, Gilbert therefore relies on ideas and definitions of happiness that large sample sizes of people commonly agree upon.
The Law of Large Numbers in AI Medicine
The law of large numbers has applications beyond understanding human behavior, as Gilbert proposes here. In artificial intelligence, for instance, scientists use it to suggest the best course of treatment for a certain condition. AI first picks out relevant information about treatments and their success rates from a vast array of medical records. It then sorts that information based on patterns it detects: for instance, which treatments were the most successful in certain circumstances. Finally, it proposes the treatment most likely to succeed for a specific patient based on the information it found and categorized.
It’s only by using the law of large numbers—and the idea that the shared results of large numbers of similar treatment experiences tend to be accurate—that AI can recommend treatments effectively.
We’ve just described why it’s hard to talk about happiness and the strategies we can use to reduce that difficulty as much as possible. Now, let’s turn to the first part of the argument Gilbert makes about why it’s so hard to predict what will make us happy: that your mind fabricates your memories, perception of the present, and imaginings of the future and that these are not objective reflections of reality. We’ll start by describing how the mind fabricates your memories.
According to Gilbert, when you summon a memory, your mind supplements existing pieces of your memory with assumed information. Your mind must do this because you don’t store memories as complete experiences of an event, which would include a massive amount of sensory detail, feelings, and thoughts. Memories are only stored snippets and narratives of the event, with many details omitted. This means that your memories are made up of both true-to-life information and assumed (potentially false) information that fills the omissions.
For instance, if you spend a day at the zoo, all you might store in your memory from that detail-rich experience is a recollection of it being too hot and perhaps the phrase “pandas asleep.” Your brain wouldn’t store the sensory experience of the heat and the crystal-clear visuals of the sleeping pandas. When you summon that memory, your brain fills in these gaps with assumptions of what belongs there: that the ice cream melted quickly, that the sleeping pandas were cute, and so on.
(Shortform note: To at least partially circumvent this issue, we might try to strengthen our memories so we don’t rely as much on fabricated information. According to Joshua Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein, you can do this by storing memories more intentionally: Visualize the information you want to remember and then mentally place that visual in a location you’re familiar with, like your home. For example, if you want to remember the ostriches at the zoo, visualize them and then place that image in your backyard.)
Now that we’ve explored how you fill in inevitable gaps in your memory with assumed information, let’s move on to describe one way in which, according to Gilbert, you fabricate your present reality: by interpreting present events in a way that’s advantageous to you. In particular, you interpret ambiguous events—events that reflect neither positively nor negatively on you—as reflecting on you positively.
Here’s an example: You’re hosting your first art showing, and a patron declares that your work is “interesting.” That word is ambiguous—it’s not definitively positive or negative. You choose to interpret it positively, as that’s more advantageous to you.
(Shortform note: Gilbert describes our tendency to positively interpret the present as universal. However, there may be cultures that are more likely to view events positively than others. For instance, many Latin American countries have high Positive Experience Indices (PEIs) because they focus more on the positive facets of life and have a strong ability to savor and take joy in experiences.)
You interpret the world to your benefit using the following techniques, continues Gilbert:
First, you only look for information that supports what you want to believe, claims Gilbert, and you ignore information that supports the opposite. For instance, if you decide to get a Labrador puppy rather than a St. Bernard puppy, you’ll want to believe that Labs are better than St. Bernards. You’ll therefore only pay attention to the blog posts, advice, and articles expounding the virtues of the Labrador and won’t pay attention to any information on how wonderful St. Bernards are.
(Shortform note: The tendency Gilbert describes here is commonly known as confirmation bias. While confirmation bias makes your life comfortable by allowing you to see the world the way you wish to see it, it also has drawbacks: For instance, it makes it difficult to have productive and balanced conversations around politics, because you only pay attention to information that supports your existing political beliefs, not to information that supports the beliefs of the opposing political party.)
Another technique you use to see the world to your benefit relates specifically to difficult situations, writes Gilbert. When something bad happens to you, you interpret that event in a way that lets you be as happy as possible about it.
Your mind does this by deriving meaning and learning from bad events. Feeling that there's sense behind a terrible event and that you’ve learned something from it allows you to feel happy—or at least thankful—that this event happened.
Here’s an example: If your family’s business goes under, you’ll be understandably miserable at first. But soon, your mind will begin to derive meaning from this occurrence: You’ll feel this was a sign to pursue a career you really love, you’ll be grateful that you no longer have to work alongside family members you don’t like, and so on. Eventually, you’ll probably be able to declare yourself happy that the business went under.
That said, continues Gilbert, your mind is less able to derive meaning and learn from moderately bad events, as opposed to extremely bad events. This is because moderately bad events don’t threaten your overall well-being as much as traumatic ones. Therefore, moderately bad events—like bad grades, fights with friends, and traffic—are more likely to leave you unhappy for longer than awful ones.
(Shortform note: How can you reduce the unhappiness you feel about moderately bad events, if your brain won’t do so automatically? You could practice deep breathing to reduce stress and irritation or try to find humor in unpleasant situations. You might also adopt a solutions-oriented approach to the bad event, considering what steps you can take to actively make things better.)
Your Happiness-Protecting Response and Antifragility
Gilbert describes a mechanism that lets you interpret bad events positively. This is similar to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility, which he describes in Antifragile. Antifragility, according to Taleb, is the ability to not only bounce back from, but actually grow and improve as a result of unfortunate events.
Beyond automatic antifragility responses—post-traumatic growth, for instance, which is humans’ natural ability to improve as a result of trauma —Taleb also outlines active ways you can build your antifragility: for instance, by testing out many solutions to problems. This allows you to bounce back easily from a series of missteps, whereas investing a lot of time and energy into research toward a single solution doesn’t give you as much flexibility to bounce back if that solution doesn’t work out.
Another technique you use to interpret the world to your benefit, writes Gilbert, is to surround yourself with people who bolster your existing beliefs. By agreeing with your beliefs and sharing your worldview, they enable you to see the world the way you want to see it.
(Shortform note: Gilbert seems to suggest that we always want our friends to confirm our beliefs and tell us what we want to hear. However, in situations where you suspect your behavior might be causing problems, you likely want truthful input so you can improve. Solicit this input by being clear on what type of input you’re after, say Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, authors of Thanks for the Feedback. If you want the honest feedback of your friend on something you’ve said or done, ask for honesty. This gives your friend permission to be frank with you.)
We’ve just shown how your mind fabricates your present by interpreting events so they reflect well on you. We’ll now describe how your imagination works and how your mind fabricates your imaginings of the future.
Gilbert says that you imagine things using images, experiences, and memories already stored in your brain. For instance, when you’re prompted to imagine a werewolf, your brain summons images of werewolves you’ve seen in movies. Your brain must use existing images to imagine things, emphasizes Gilbert: Without an existing reference, your brain can’t imagine something. This is why, if someone asks you to imagine a “sneedle,” you can’t do it because you have no stored images of a sneedle.
(Shortform note: In the same way it’s impossible for us to imagine something we have no prior reference for, as Gilbert argues, it’s often impossible for writers of sci-Fi novels, TV shows, and films to imagine facets of the future for which there are no current references. For example, the 1991 film Until the End of the World predicted that we would be using video-pay phones in 1999. At the time of the movie’s making, the scriptwriter perhaps could not conceive of a personal mobile device that made video calls.)
Now that we’ve explained the basic mechanics of imagining, let’s turn to some of the ways your brain fabricates your vision of the future:
Gilbert first writes that you fabricate visions of the future that reflect events and experiences you’ve already been through, rather than new events and experiences yet to come. This is because, as described above, when you imagine future scenarios, your brain uses existing references—your current experiences and memories. The result, concludes Gilbert, is that your visions of the future don’t reflect what the future will be like.
Let’s see this in action: You discover you’ve won a prize at work, which your supervisor calls “amazing office swag.” You’ll receive this prize at the end of the day. You spend the rest of the day imagining what the prize will be, and you can only use your existing images or memories of “office swag” to do this. Perhaps in the past, you received a new cell phone as office swag, or you remember that your friend once won a car from her company. You therefore imagine that at the end of the day, you’ll receive a new cell phone and a car.
However, when the time comes, you only receive a mouse pad and a t-shirt. In this way, you’ve fabricated a vision of the future based only on existing images and memories—and this fabricated vision of the future ends up being incorrect.
The Upside of Using Existing References
Here, Gilbert presents using past experiences as references when predicting the future as wholly unhelpful, as this process often leads you to fabricate improbable future scenarios. This begs the question: Can using past experiences as references ever be helpful?
In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke suggests that this process can be helpful when making decisions in the present. She calls the act of thinking about past experiences (and imagining future scenarios) “mental time travel” and argues that this process helps you make more rational decisions. According to Duke, mental time travel forces you to use the deliberative part of your brain, which takes into account all possible information when making a choice. This includes helpful information about the past that you can use as a reference for good present decisions.
For instance, imagine you’re deciding whether or not to eat a fifth cookie. You use mental time travel to reflect on past scenarios when you ate five cookies in quick succession and remember that doing so made you feel unwell. You use this past experience as a reference for a positive present decision: You decide not to eat the cookie and consequently avoid nausea.
The second way your mind fabricates your view of the future is by omitting available yet unpleasant information from your predictions, writes Gilbert—particularly unpleasant information that questions the version of the future that you want to play out or believe will play out. Your mind does this because, as we saw when discussing interpreting the present, it prefers to consume information that supports your existing beliefs and ignore information that doesn’t.
This inclination to ignore undesirable information means you might create an image of the future that’s unrealistically positive. Here’s an example: You’re deciding between buying a gorgeous Victorian home that needs a lot of work and a newer yet less charming home. You know—perhaps even from previous experience—that the Victorian home will have structural problems due to its age and cost a lot to repair. But because you love the idea of living in a beautiful old home, you omit these shortcomings from your vision of your life in the Victorian home and buy it anyway. Once you’ve bought it, though, you’ll be unhappy with the amount and cost of repairs required.
(Shortform note: Gilbert suggests we omit disadvantageous information from our vision of the future because we don’t like to consider information that challenges our beliefs. But there might be an additional explanation for this tendency to leave out critical details: Our brains can only process a finite amount of information at a time. This means that in situations in which there’s a lot of information to consider—which house to buy, for instance—we simply can’t process it all. Our brains may then prioritize the advantageous information over the disadvantageous information, because, as Gilbert writes, it’s more appealing.)
We’ve just outlined the first part of Gilbert’s main argument: that your brain fabricates your perception of the past, present, and future. Now let’s move on to the second part of his thesis: how this fabricated reality leads you to make decisions about the future that aren’t conducive to happiness.
To present this part of the argument, we’ll first show that you lack awareness that your brain is fabricating your reality. We’ll then describe how this lack of awareness forms the foundation for poor decision-making that results in your unhappiness.
Though you always supplement memories with assumed information, interpret events in the present positively, and imagine improbable futures, you don’t recognize you do this, says Gilbert. You believe you see, remember, and imagine the world exactly as it is and that your memories, experience of the present, and imaginings of the future are therefore objectively correct.
(Shortform note: According to Gilbert, you fabricate your entire reality but believe incorrectly that you perceive it objectively. However, this view may be too extreme: Sometimes, you do perceive the world objectively. For instance, when you touch a rose, you don’t fabricate your reality of being in pain—you experience the pain objectively. On the other hand, when your friend fails to smile at you and you’re immediately certain they’re mad at you, you’re fabricating your reality to a higher degree.)
Your lack of awareness that you’re fabricating your reality means you use fabricated and inaccurate memories and experiences to inform your choices about the future, argues Gilbert. Because these choices are based on falsehoods and overly optimistic imaginings, they often lead to unexpected and poor outcomes, which do not make you happy.
For instance, based on a memory of a short hike you took and think you enjoyed, you fabricate a vague vision of yourself in five years in which you’re climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and enjoying it. This vague and fabricated vision informs your decision to begin training for the climb. However, it turns out this decision makes you miserable because you hate physical exertion. In fact, you hated the physical exertion of your initial short hike but strategically omitted that negative detail when calling on your memories to create your vision of the Kilimanjaro climb. The choice to climb the mountain ultimately becomes a poor one because of these delusional imaginings.
Why Don’t All Choices Make Us Happy?
Earlier in this guide, we showed that our brains are wired to keep us as happy as possible as often as possible, even during adversity. This raises the question: If our minds are hard-wired to make us deludedly happy no matter what, why does Gilbert claim that certain decisions about the future make us unhappy? Shouldn’t our positive, fabricated interpretation of the world kick in to allow us to be happy even if we make “wrong,” unhappiness-producing choices about the future?
We might explain this by saying that certain choices about the future prevent us from using one or more of our previously described happiness-maintaining techniques. For instance, if you choose to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and join a group of people training for the climb, you’re no longer able to surround yourself with friends who bolster your belief that climbing the mountain will be fun and easy. Instead, you’re surrounded by experienced people who tell you that the climb will be incredibly difficult—and this erodes your happiness as a result of your choice.
We just described the second part of Gilbert’s main argument: that your lack of awareness that you fabricate your reality leads you to make poor choices. We’ll now move on to the final part of Gilbert’s main argument: the specific poor choices about the future that leave unhappy.
According to Gilbert, you make choices about the future that are based on feelings you have now. Because how you’re feeling now may not reflect how you’d feel about the choice in the future, this can lead to poor decisions.
To explain this further, let’s first return to an idea we explored earlier: that your mind envisions the future using existing references (your current experiences and memories). Gilbert notes that when you’re considering a future choice, your mind pictures what that choice will look like using references from your past and present. You then have an emotional reaction to this picture in your mind, and this emotional reaction informs your decision—you’ll opt for the choice if you have a positive emotional reaction to the image of it.
Problems arise when your brain is already experiencing a strong emotional reaction to something in the present. In such cases, your brain focuses on your present feeling—ignoring the true future emotional reaction to the scenario you’ve imagined—and transposes it onto your imagined future scenario. You thus think your present feeling applies to the choice you’re considering for your future, even if your present emotion has nothing to do with the choice at hand. This can lead you to, say, reject a choice that would make you happy just because you’re feeling sad in the present.
Thinking Rationally, Not Emotionally
Gilbert’s description of how we accidentally transpose current feelings onto imagined future scenarios suggests that we’re doomed to make bad choices based on misplaced emotions. However, there may be a way to circumvent this issue: by using logic-driven tools to assess your choices, rather than relying on your possibly flawed emotions to make decisions.
One way to do this is by implementing a rigorous decision-making process in a spreadsheet:
Step 1: State the goal of your decision—for instance, to move to a new city where you can live for the next 10 years.
Step 2: Brainstorm options for achieving this goal. In this case, you’d write down cities you’re considering.
Step 3: Define a set of criteria by which you’ll judge each option. At this point, rather than having an emotional reaction to your memories of both cities and making a decision based on that reaction, you’d instead decide what living criteria matter to you: Cost of living, proximity to public transit, and so on.
Step 4: Assign a degree of importance to each criterion. You might value the cost of living over proximity to public transit, as you’re on a budget.
Step 5: Define questions about how well each option fits the criteria. You might define the question “What is the average cost of a condo in each city?”
Step 6: Perform multiple rounds of research to answer the questions and rank the different options based on your findings and the degree of importance of each criterion. (Don’t be afraid to re-rank the options based on new information as you continue your research.)
According to Gilbert, another type of poor choice about the future happens because you misjudge how much regret you’ll feel in the future and over what choice. Specifically, you mistakenly think that you’ll regret a bold, risky decision and that you won’t regret a safe decision. Because you want to avoid the pain of regret, you often opt for the safe decision. In reality, you’re more likely to regret a safe decision than a bold one.
(Shortform note: Gilbert presents regret as a negative feeling to avoid. But in The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argues that you could see regret as fulfilling several positive functions: The threat of regret causes you to seriously consider decisions, rather than making snap choices. Regret in the wake of a bad decision is also a learning tool, he writes, because it tells you how to behave better moving forward. Finally, when you regret something, you’re more likely to fix the situation or make amends with anyone you’ve harmed.)
Let’s conclude this guide by talking about the errors in your memory that, in Gilbert’s view, prevent you from ever correcting your poor choices about the future.
First, you believe that extraordinary events in your past are more likely to reoccur than they are, writes Gilbert. This means you base decisions on the expectation that extraordinary events will happen, when they probably won’t.
You believe this because your mind recalls memories of extraordinary occurrences more readily than ordinary ones, claims Gilbert. Ordinary events and outcomes—like taking the train and arriving at work without incident—happen all the time, so your mind doesn’t register them as vividly as uncommon events and outcomes—like taking the train and being re-routed to a different city. You therefore overestimate the frequency and dominance of extraordinary events.
This means that when weighing a decision about the future, writes Gilbert, you’ll easily recall unique, extraordinary instances in the past when the option that normally doesn’t make you happy, did make you happy. Based on this selective memory, you’ll choose the option that probably won’t make you happy, thinking it’s more likely to generate happiness than it really is.
Using Uncommon Experiences and Overcomplicated Considerations
Gilbert claims that because your mind highlights memories of strange occurrences over commonplace ones, you believe strange events are more likely to occur in the future than they really are. You therefore base your choices about the future on uncommon past events.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes a similar way your brain triggers poor decisions: by overcomplicating those decisions. Rather than relying on straightforward information and simple considerations—tantamount to using memories of commonplace occurrences to inform our choices—we give more weight to unimportant factors and favor complicated considerations over simple ones—which is similar to using unusual, extraordinary memories to inform our choices. This is a mistake, claims Kahneman, because often, simple considerations and decision-making formulas lead to the best decisions.
Another reason your memories can’t help you correct your decision-making is that you reconstruct memories to present how you think you should have felt at the time, rather than how you did feel, says Gilbert. This means you don’t remember your true emotional reaction to an event and can’t learn from it.
Here’s an example: You hated going to your sister’s wedding. However, you believe that you should enjoy weddings because everyone does. Therefore, you’ll falsely remember yourself as having been happy at the event=. This will prevent you from correcting your decision-making in the future, and you’ll RSVP “yes” to another wedding that will, in reality, not be fun for you.
(Shortform note: One way to better remember how you truly felt, rather than how you believe you should have felt, is to journal about your feelings. By noting down when you’re having an intense emotional reaction to an event and what, specifically, you’re feeling, you create a reliable historical account of your feelings, to which you can later refer and learn from. Journaling can even help you make sense of your feelings if you’re confused or overwhelmed about an event. This further reduces the chances that you’ll misremember or misinterpret how you felt about that event later.)
In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert presents a fundamental problem with humans’ quest for happiness: In the present, you make choices and take actions to bring about future events that you believe will make you happy. However, those choices and actions don’t always make you happy and often make you actively unhappy.
Gilbert’s explanation for this is that your imagination (which you use to envision the future and what will bring you the most joy), your memory, and your perception of the present are largely inaccurate. When you use these inaccurate and poorly-informed visions of the future, present, and past to make choices about what to do in the future, your choices are often poor and hinder future happiness. This means that frequently, the best way to find happiness is not to deliberately plan for it but to simply stumble upon it by accident.
Daniel Gilbert is an award-winning writer, teacher, and researcher in social psychology. His interests include decision-making, humans’ relationship to the future, and social inference—how humans attempt to understand each other. He’s currently the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
Gilbert has published prolifically and has featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Scientific American, The New Yorker, Science, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Psychology Today. In 2014, Science wrote that Gilbert was one of the 50 most popular scientists on Twitter.
Gilbert has also appeared on-screen: He co-wrote and hosted a NOVA series called This Emotional Life in which he explored human emotional well-being. Gilbert’s 2004 TED Talk, The Surprising Science of Happiness, based on his research for Stumbling on Happiness, has over 19 million views. He’s even appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to discuss how people can take small steps to increase their happiness, as well as in Prudential commercials.
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Publisher: Penguin Random House
Stumbling on Happiness was published in 2006 and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books the following year. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for six months and sold over a million copies across the world.
Just before turning his attention to happiness, Gilbert primarily studied the fundamental attribution error: the human conviction that others’ actions are the result of their personality while our actions are the result of external circumstances. It was only when he went through a prolonged period of personal difficulty that he began wondering why we so often mispredict how we’ll feel in the future and what will make us happy. This led Gilbert to conduct experiments on humans’ ability to predict their future emotional states. His findings from this research formed the foundation for Stumbling on Happiness.
Stumbling on Happiness is part of an ever-growing body of work on positive psychology: the study of human happiness. However, the book occupies a unique space in this field because it doesn’t offer actionable advice on how to be happy, instead focusing on why we’re wired to sabotage our future happiness. Other positive psychology works that offer a more action-oriented approach to achieving happiness include:
Stumbling on Happiness is widely acknowledged as an important and valuable contribution to the field of positive psychology and popular science literature, as evidenced by its receipt of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books—an award for popular science books previously given to Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson. The book has also turned Gilbert into a sought-after expert for educational TV shows, documentaries, and talks.
Stumbling on Happiness has received largely positive reviews. Reviewers found Gilbert’s arguments clear, his evidence strong, and his writing style humorous and engaging. They also appreciated Gilbert’s comprehensiveness. He includes more than just enough information to support his thesis: Instead, he explores in detail how our minds work (and often fail to work as expected). Finally, satisfied readers argue that anyone with an interest in human cognition, not just in human happiness, will find something interesting and useful here.
Readers who didn’t enjoy the book felt that its title was misleading—they expected to learn how to stumble on happiness. Others felt that Gilbert’s explanations were too long and that the book was padded with unnecessary background and tangential information. A final complaint was that Gilbert’s writing style was too slick and that he wrote flippantly about serious subjects, like death and suffering.
As discussed above, Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book about how to find happiness: It’s a book about decision-making and imagination and how these faculties fail to produce the happiness we think they should. Gilbert offers no advice on how to counteract our tendencies to make predictions and choices that limit our happiness, focusing only on how and why we do so.
Much of the book is an explanation of how our minds work, backed up by scientific evidence. The main idea—that our imaginings of the future, memories of the past, and perception of the present are fabricated and thus form the foundation for poor choices that don’t make us happy in the future—takes up relatively little page space. This is, in large part, a necessity, as some of Gilbert’s principles are complex and require significant background information to grasp. For instance, he must explain first how selective and subjective memory is before he can describe how a selective and subjective memory forms the basis for poor decisions about the future.
However, at times, Gilbert arguably gets lost in the finer points of his research and doesn’t spend enough time explaining his thesis. For instance, he dedicates a lot of page space to describing how our personal definitions of happiness differ, a point that’s not central to the book’s main idea.
Gilbert breaks his book into six parts. In the first part, “Prospection,” he describes why humans think about the future in the first place. In the second part, “Subjectivity,” Gilbert explains why it’s difficult to discuss happiness objectively and presents ways for us to overcome the obstacles to doing so.
The next three parts—the bulk of the book—describe the three major flaws of the human imagination that cause you to make poor choices about your future. Gilbert labels these parts “Realism” (your failure to imagine the future accurately), “Presentism” (your tendency to imagine the future based on events and experiences in the present), and “Rationalization” (your tendency to rationalize even initially terrible decisions as positive). In each part, he dives deeply into the cognitive processes underlying each individual flaw, as well as the problems that each flaw causes.
Gilbert then concludes with a part called “Corrigibility,” in which he explains why we can never correct these three flaws of our imaginations.
Gilbert’s structural choice of attributing a detailed part to each flaw of the imagination means the reader develops a firm understanding of each individual flaw and how it occurs. However, this siloed structure, with very little information connecting the flaws to each other and to the rest of the book, can make it easy to lose track of the book’s overarching thesis: that, because you fabricate a large part of your perception of reality, you use incorrect information when making decisions about the future and consequently become unhappy. In particular, since Gilbert explains the neurological origin of each flaw in great detail, it’s easy to become bogged down in explanations of human cognition and fail to connect these explanations to the thesis.
Rather than structuring this guide to make the three individual flaws of the human imagination our focal point (as Gilbert does), we’ve structured it around Gilbert’s central thesis that, because we manufacture our reality, we use poor information when determining what to do in the future. Each part contains an explanation of one section of his thesis:
Part 1: Why It’s Difficult to Talk About Happiness: Before we get into Gilbert’s central argument about why we make happiness-reducing decisions about the future, we’ll describe five reasons why it’s difficult to objectively talk about happiness in the first place. We’ll also present two propositions that will allow us to nonetheless have a constructive conversation about human happiness.
Part 2: You Fabricate Your Reality: This part presents the first section of Gilbert’s main argument: that your memories, perception of the present, and imaginings of the future are fabricated and not objective depictions of reality. We’ll show how these three faculties are, in large part, constructed.
Part 3: Your Fabricated Reality Leads You to Make Poor Choices: In this part, we’ll continue Gilbert’s argument by showing that you aren’t aware that your mind fabricates your memories, perception of the present, and imaginings of the future. This lack of awareness leads you to think you’re seeing reality exactly as it is. When planning your future, you base your decisions about what to do to find happiness on this fabricated reality. Because the information you’re using to make decisions is inaccurate, those decisions end up reducing your happiness.
Part 4: Six Poor Choices About What to Do in the Future: Here, we’ll present six types of common poor choices that result from the process described above.
Part 5: You Can’t Make Better Choices About Your Future: We’ll conclude the guide by showing how you’ll fail to correct your decision-making in the future. Even when you try to learn from others’ experiences, you’ll end up heeding poor advice and ignoring good advice.
To create a clearer logical progression between ideas, we’ve rearranged the ideas from Gilbert’s three parts about flaws in imagination. Specifically, we’ve separated the information about how each flaw works, how they lead to poor choices, and the specific poor choices that they trigger into three distinct parts (Parts 2, 3, and 4).
We’ve also moved the ideas in Gilbert’s first part, “Prospection,” into Part 2.3, about our flaws when imagining the future, to group together ideas about how and why we imagine the future and thus improve the flow of logic.
Our commentary in this guide covers several areas: We'll explore how Gilbert's ideas about decision-making link to other facets of human cognition, such as cognitive biases, memory, and self-image. We’ll also connect Gilbert’s ideas to those in other prominent books on decision-making. Additionally, we’ll offer actionable solutions to some of the cognitive obstacles that Gilbert feels we can’t overcome. Finally, we’ll point out when some of the cognitive processes Gilbert thinks hinder our decision-making have valuable functions in other areas of thinking.
Have you ever wondered why you so often regret the decisions you make about what to do in the future? In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert points out that our imaginations (our capacity to envision the future and speculate about what will make us happiest), memories, and perceptions of the present are highly subjective and inaccurate. When we make choices about our futures based on this inaccurate information, those choices end up hindering our future happiness. For this reason, it seems that we more often stumble on happiness than successfully create it.
Gilbert found that during moments of adversity in his life, he was incapable of understanding that his unhappiness would pass and that life would go back to normal—in other words, he was fabricating a dark vision of the future that didn’t reflect what it would truly be like. He embarked on a journey to discover why he was unable to accurately predict the future (and how he’d feel about it), and his research in this area became the basis for this book. Stumbling on Happiness may not show you how to predict the future and overcome the cognitive barriers to making good choices about your future—Gilbert believes this is impossible—but it will show you why you end up making bad choices.
We’ve broken this guide into five parts: Part 1 provides background information on the inherent difficulties of discussing happiness objectively. In this part, we’ll also present two propositions that will allow us to cope with those difficulties as much as possible so we can have a productive conversation about happiness.
In Part 2, we’ll discuss the first section of Gilbert’s argument: that your mind fabricates your reality by manipulating your memories, your perception of the present, and your imagination of the future.
Part 3 will cover the next section of Gilbert’s argument: that you’re not aware your mind fabricates your reality. Therefore, you trust this fabricated reality and use it as the basis for your decision-making about the future. Because you’re using fabricated, not truthful, information, your decisions are poor and unconducive to happiness.
In Part 4, we’ll present six types of poor choices you make due to the process outlined above. Finally, in Part 5, we’ll show why, despite your best efforts, you can’t correct your decision-making about your future based on lessons from past experiences and the experiences of others.
Let’s now cover the five reasons Gilbert believes it’s difficult to discuss happiness objectively:
According to Gilbert, the first reason it’s difficult to talk about happiness is that you can’t describe it unless you reference something else. You can only talk about happiness by saying what makes you happy or what happiness is like. You can’t concretely say what happiness itself is.
For instance, you might explain to a friend that the happiness you felt when your fiancé proposed was like the feeling of awakening to a warm spring morning, or you might show them a picture of your delighted face in an engagement photo. You can’t, however, describe your happiness without these references.
(Shortform note: Gilbert contends that it’s difficult to describe happiness without using external comparisons. However, researchers have been able to discern with more ease what makes you happy: In the seminal Harvard Study of Adult Development, which tracked the health and well-being of 268 Harvard students over the course of 80 years, researchers found that having strong relationships was the greatest predictor of happiness.)
Another reason why Gilbert believes it’s hard to speak about happiness is that sometimes, we say we’re happy, but we’re only happy about something. Being happy is different from being happy “about,” which is commenting on someone else’s happiness or the potential to be happy.
For instance, you probably aren’t happy that your neighbor left their dogs with you while they vacation in Hawaii, but you might say you’re happy about the fact that they’re taking a break. In this case, you’re commenting on your neighbor’s happiness, rather than experiencing happiness directly. Later, you might say you’ll be happy about their return—you’re not happy now, but you’re commenting on your potential future happiness.
(Shortform note: Gilbert proposes that feeling happy about something isn’t the same as being happy. In fact, when you say you’re happy for someone or about something, you might even be feeling the opposite of happiness: anger or envy. For example, if your neighbor leaves their dog with you while they go to Hawaii, you might feel anger over having more responsibility. When this occurs, balance out your negative feelings with positive ones by refraining from comparing yourself to the other person. This reduces unhappiness that arises when you feel others have it better than you.)
Gilbert writes that we further struggle to talk about happiness because we often confuse virtuous behavior—which only leads to happiness—for happiness itself. You might thus think you’re automatically happy when doing virtuous volunteer work at a soup kitchen. But this isn’t true: You can volunteer virtuously for years, but if you don’t enjoy the work, you won’t feel genuine happiness. You’ll only be making other people—the users of the soup kitchen—happy through your behavior.
(Shortform note: Gilbert argues that virtuous behavior isn’t tantamount to happiness. Others go even further to argue that if you act virtuously with the expectation of it making you happy, it reduces the virtue of the act. In Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposes that the smaller the reward you receive personally for a virtuous act, the more virtuous it is. Indeed, virtuous behavior should make you somewhat uncomfortable, he says, because it should require you to make a sacrifice or take a risk.)
Another reason it’s hard to speak about and compare levels of happiness, writes Gilbert, is that we all have different scales by which we measure happiness, yet none of us know what the other person’s scale is. Therefore, we might unknowingly describe the same amount of happiness in different terms.
Here’s an example to illustrate this: You and your friend go to a doughnut shop and eat the same plain doughnut. You both have the same experience of the doughnut (five units of fun, say), but afterward, you exclaim it was “awesome!” while your friend says it was “okay.”
Gilbert writes that the explanation for this would be that your friend has had better doughnuts in the past that created, say, seven units of happiness, meaning comparatively, this “five units of happiness” doughnut merits only an “okay.” You, on the other hand, have only ever eaten worse doughnuts that created less happiness (say, two units of happiness). You describe this one as “awesome!” because compared to your previous experiences, it seems amazing on your “happiness scale,” even if it only really creates mid-level happiness.
(Shortform note: We might also look to culture and language to explain why different people describe things differently. American English is notoriously hyperbolic, and Americans use explosive words where other cultures use milder ones. An “awesome!” to an American might correspond to a mere “fine” from a British person. To be accurately understood in a different culture, you might need to adopt the level of hyperbole common to that culture. An English person new to a job in the States might need to begin using words like “amazing” and “excellent” when they would have previously just used the word “fine.”)
The last reason it’s hard to discuss happiness is that sometimes, you’re not aware you’re happy, writes Gilbert. This is because the part of your brain that processes experience—the experience of happiness or anger, for instance—is separate from the part of your brain that develops awareness of the experience—the conscious knowledge that you’re happy or angry. You can therefore have a physiological experience of happiness but not register that you’re happy, explains Gilbert.
(Shortform note: Gilbert asserts that you don’t always know when you’re happy. Still, you can take steps to improve your awareness of your emotional state by meditating. Meditation helps you be more present with your thoughts and feelings when they come up. During meditation, you can even pose questions to yourself to become more in tune with your inner experience and promote further happiness. You might ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish in life now and what obstacles are in your way. This can make you both more aware of your feelings (for instance, frustration about the obstacles) and also of potential solutions to problems that can make you happier.)
Now that we’ve covered the ways in which Gilbert believes the act of talking about happiness is inherently difficult, you might be asking yourself why we should try to do so at all. While Gilbert acknowledges the challenges involved in doing so, he claims we can still have a constructive discourse about happiness and presents two propositions on how to do this:
Though our attempts to discuss happiness will always be flawed, Gilbert writes that they will be least flawed if we rely on accounts of happiness by the people experiencing it—not by observers. Someone eating a cookie is better able to describe the happiness of eating a cookie than the person watching them eat a cookie, for instance.
(Shortform note: There are both advantages, as Gilbert points out, and disadvantages to using self-reported data on happiness—or, indeed, anything. Common disadvantages include people (particularly experiment subjects) giving responses they think are socially acceptable, rather than honest. For instance, when asked if a picture of a smiling baby makes them happy, a subject may answer “yes” because they think that’s the acceptable response, even if it’s not true. Subjects can also interpret questions differently, leading to incomparable data. For example, someone might interpret a question as being about their general level of happiness, while another subject might interpret the same question as referring to their present happiness.)
Additionally, Gilbert states that when large numbers of people report the same experience of happiness, we can take that experience to be reasonably accurate—this is commonly known as the law of large numbers. In formulating his principles about happiness, Gilbert therefore relies on ideas and definitions of happiness that large sample sizes of people commonly agree upon.
The Law of Large Numbers in AI Medicine
The law of large numbers has applications beyond understanding human behavior, as Gilbert proposes here. In artificial intelligence, for instance, scientists use it to suggest the best course of treatment for a certain condition. AI first picks out relevant information about treatments and their success rates from a vast array of medical records. It then sorts that information based on patterns it detects: for instance, which treatments were the most successful in certain circumstances. Finally, it proposes the treatment most likely to succeed for a specific patient based on the information it found and categorized.
It’s only by using the law of large numbers—and the idea that the shared results of large numbers of similar treatment experiences tend to be accurate—that AI can recommend treatments effectively.
We’ve just described why it’s hard to talk about happiness and the strategies we can use to reduce that difficulty so that we can have a constructive conversation about it.
Now, let’s turn to the first part of the argument Gilbert makes about why it’s hard to predict what will make us happy: that your mind fabricates your memories, perception of the present, and imaginings of the future and that these are not objective reflections of reality. We’ll start by describing how the mind fabricates your memories.
According to Gilbert, when you summon a memory, your mind supplements existing pieces of the memory with assumed information. Your mind must do this because you don’t store memories as complete experiences of an event, which would include a massive amount of sensory detail, feelings, and thoughts. Memories are only stored snippets and narratives of the event, with many details omitted. This means that your memories are made up of both true-to-life and assumed (potentially false) information that fills the omissions.
For instance, if you spend a day at the zoo, all you might store in memory from that detail-rich experience is a recollection of it being too hot and the phrase “pandas asleep.” Your brain wouldn’t store the sensory experience of the heat and the crystal-clear visuals of the sleeping pandas. When you summon that memory, your brain fills in these gaps with assumptions of what belongs there: that the ice cream melted quickly, that the sleeping pandas were cute, and so on.
(Shortform note: To at least partially circumvent this issue, we might try to strengthen our memories so we don’t rely as much on fabricated information. In Moonwalking With Einstein, Joshua Foer says you can do this by storing memories more intentionally. First, visualize the information you want to remember and then mentally place that visual in a location you’re familiar with, like your home. For example, if you want to remember the ostriches at the zoo, visualize them and then place that image in your backyard.)
Not only does your brain fill in gaps in your memories with assumed information, writes Gilbert, it also incorporates new information into the memory retroactively. A suggestion in the present that something happened in the past can become a permanent part of your memory, even if it didn’t happen.
Let’s say that after having been to the zoo, someone suggests that the tigers were particularly ferocious that day. Even if you don’t recall what the tigers were like, you’ll likely incorporate their ferociousness into your memory, whether they were ferocious or not.
(Shortform note: Gilbert presents the mind’s tendency to incorporate new information into memory as problematic. Yet this tendency can sometimes be helpful and is often a necessary part of the learning process. When you fit new information into existing knowledge in your memory, you build new neural connections and enhance your initial understanding of a topic, write Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel in Make It Stick. For instance, if you know Jane Austen wrote in the 18th century, and then learn that women were bound to strict gender rules at that time that made it less common for women to be published, you can incorporate the new information into your existing knowledge of Jane Austen and conclude that she was pushing gender boundaries.)
In the last chapter, we described how you fill in inevitable gaps in your memory with assumed information. Now, let’s move on to describe two ways you fabricate your present reality: by filling in visual and aural gaps in your perception with assumed information, and by interpreting present events in a way that’s advantageous to you.
Your brain doesn’t just fill in the gaps in your memory with assumed information, claims Gilbert: It even fills in the gaps in your visual and aural perception of the world right now with assumed information.
First, says Gilbert, you have a literal blind spot—a small area you can’t see—and your brain fills in that spot based on what it sees around it. For example, if you’re looking at a blue sky, but part of your perception is obscured by your blind spot, your brain will fill in the blind spot with the blue sky it does see.
Second, adds Gilbert, your brain fills in sounds you don’t hear clearly or fully with approximations based on the contextual sounds you do hear. For example, if you’re talking to a friend while a dog barks nearby, you might technically only hear: “Today was a long day, so I’ll go to -eep early tonight.” However, your mind will fill in the missing sound “sl” to create the word “sleep” because that makes the most sense given the context of the sentence.
Your Brain Prefers Fabricated Information
Gilbert contends that your brain supplements your visual and aural perception of reality with fabricated information. He doesn’t mention that your brain may trust that fabricated information more than the information you truly perceive.
A study demonstrates this: Researchers showed a subject two images of vertical stripes. One of those images contained several horizontal stripes, but those fell within the subject’s blind spot. The subject’s mind therefore filled in the blind spot with the vertical stripes it detected around it, rendering both images identical.
When researchers asked the subject which of the two images seemed more likely to contain continuous vertical stripes, they expected participants to opt for the vertical stripes-only image. But, in fact, 65% of participants chose the image with the horizontal stripes in their blind spots. It seems their brains were more inclined to trust fabricated information than information they truly perceived.
The second way you fabricate your perception of the present, writes Gilbert, is by interpreting events around you in a way that’s beneficial to you. In particular, you interpret ambiguous events—events that reflect neither positively or negatively on you—as reflecting on you positively.
Here’s an example: You’re hosting your first art showing, and a patron declares that your work is “interesting.” That word is ambiguous—it’s not definitively positive or negative. You choose to interpret it positively, as that’s more advantageous to you.
(Shortform note: Gilbert describes our tendency to positively interpret the present as universal. However, there may be cultures that are more likely to view events positively than others. For instance, many Latin American countries have high Positive Experience Indices (PEIs) because they focus on the positive facets of life and have a strong ability to take joy in experiences.)
You interpret the world to your benefit using the following five techniques, continues Gilbert:
First, you only look for information that supports what you want to believe, claims Gilbert, and ignore information that supports the opposite. For instance, if you decide to get a Labrador rather than a St. Bernard, you’ll want to believe that Labs are better than St. Bernards. You’ll therefore only pay attention to blog posts and articles expounding the virtues of the Labrador and won’t pay attention to information on how wonderful St. Bernards are.
(Shortform note: This tendency to look only for information that supports your existing beliefs is commonly known as confirmation bias. While confirmation bias makes your life comfortable by letting you see the world the way you want to see it, it also has drawbacks: For instance, it makes it difficult to have balanced conversations around politics because you only pay attention to information that supports your existing political beliefs, not to information that supports the beliefs of the opposing political party.)
Next, when you encounter information that contradicts your beliefs, you perceive it as less credible than information that supports your beliefs, writes Gilbert. For instance, if you stumble across an article that describes St. Bernards’s loyalty, you might decide the author isn’t an experienced pet owner so your preference for Labs isn’t undermined.
(Shortform note: Ignoring good information that flies in the face of what you want to believe, as Gilbert describes here, may be easier now than ever before. Thanks to the internet, there’s a huge amount of information at your fingertips supporting a vast swath of viewpoints. You can therefore easily find a source that discredits the information you disagree with and supports your own beliefs, allowing you to maintain your stance.)
Another technique you use to interpret the world to your benefit, writes Gilbert, is to surround yourself with people who bolster your existing beliefs. By agreeing with your beliefs and sharing your worldview, they enable you to see the world the way you want to see it. You even prompt them to express what you want to hear—by asking leading questions, for instance.
For example, when chatting with a friend who shares your passion for Labs about the Labrador you’re about to buy, you might start the conversation by saying: “It’s great how much less Labradors shed than St. Bernards, right?” In this way, you prompt your friend to agree with you.
(Shortform note: Gilbert seems to suggest that we always want our friends to confirm our beliefs and tell us what we want to hear. However, in situations where you suspect your behavior might be causing problems, you likely want truthful input so you can improve. Solicit this input by being clear on what type of input you’re after, say Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, authors of Thanks for the Feedback. If you want the honest feedback of your friend on something you’ve said or done, ask for honesty. This gives your friend permission to be frank with you.)
To interpret the world to your benefit, you also favorably compare yourself to those who are worse off than you (and sometimes even cause others to be worse off than you), writes Gilbert. For instance, you might compare your career to that of your less successful friend so you seem more accomplished. You might even fail to send them a great job posting because that could threaten your relatively stronger career standing.
(Shortform note: Gilbert outlines one form of comparison we often make—against those who are worse off—but humans also habitually compare themselves to those who are better off. In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan B. Peterson argues that because we now receive vast amounts of information about other peoples’ lives through mass media, we feel compelled to compare ourselves to others who seem like they’re doing better than we are. This leaves us feeling bad, rather than good, about ourselves.)
The final technique you use to see the world to your benefit relates specifically to difficult situations, writes Gilbert. When something bad happens to you, you interpret that event in a way that lets you be as happy as possible about it.
Your mind does this by deriving meaning and learning from bad events. Feeling that there's sense behind a terrible event and that you’ve learned something from it lets you feel happy—or at least thankful—this event happened.
Here’s an example: If your family’s business goes under, you’ll be understandably miserable at first. But soon, your mind will begin to derive meaning from this occurrence: You’ll feel this was a sign to pursue a career you really love, you’ll be grateful you no longer have to work alongside family members you don’t like, and so on. Eventually, you’ll probably be able to declare yourself happy that the business went under.
That said, continues Gilbert, your mind is less able to derive meaning and learn from moderately bad events, as opposed to extremely bad events. This is because moderately bad events don’t threaten your overall well-being as much as traumatic ones. Therefore, moderately bad events—like bad grades, fights with friends, and traffic—are more likely to leave you unhappy for longer than awful ones.
(Shortform note: How can you reduce the unhappiness you feel about moderately bad events if your brain won’t do so automatically? You could practice deep breathing to reduce stress and irritation or try to find humor in unpleasant situations. You might also adopt a solutions-oriented approach to the bad event, considering what steps you can take to actively make things better.)
Your Happiness-Protecting Response and Antifragility
Gilbert describes a mechanism that lets you interpret bad events positively. This is similar to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility, which he describes in Antifragile. Antifragility, according to Taleb, is the ability to not only bounce back from, but grow and improve as a result of unfortunate events.
Beyond automatic antifragility responses—post-traumatic growth, for instance, which is humans’ natural ability to improve as a result of trauma—Taleb also outlines active ways you can build your antifragility: for instance, by testing out many solutions to problems. This allows you to bounce back from a series of missteps, whereas investing a lot of time and energy into research toward a single solution doesn’t give you as much flexibility to bounce back if that solution doesn’t work out.
Strengthen your awareness that you base your beliefs and actions only on certain information—usually, information that you agree with—and that you therefore interpret your reality, rather than view it objectively.
Note some of your current lifestyle choices and habits. These could include dietary choices (Are you a vegan or vegetarian, for instance?), exercise choices (Do you exercise regularly? At what time of the day?), recreational choices (How do you spend your free time? Playing sports? Watching TV?), or any other conscious choice you’ve made about how to lead your daily life.
Now, briefly write down the beliefs that underpin those lifestyle choices. Why have you made these dietary, exercise, recreational, or other choices? (For instance, you might believe that humans should protect the environment, which led you to adopt a freegan diet. Or you might believe that heavy exercise more than twice a week can damage your body, which is why you never exercise more frequently than that.)
Describe the information you received that led to the beliefs you outlined above. What did you learn, see, or experience that formed the basis for your beliefs? (For example, you learned about climate change in school, which led you to believe you must protect the environment. Or you saw your father damage his ankle on his third run of the week, which led you to avoid frequent, heavy exercise.)
Next, consider what alternate information would undermine your beliefs. You don’t have to substantiate it—just think of ideas or data that would force you to believe the opposite of what you now believe. (If you were to learn, for instance, that humans don’t cause climate change, you might not believe that we have a duty to protect the environment. Or, if you were to learn that exercising every day is the best way to avoid injury, you’d no longer believe that exercising more than twice a week can harm your body.)
How does considering the possibility of alternative information make you feel about your habits and the beliefs that underpin them? (For instance, do you now feel unsure whether or not exercising more than twice a week truly is unhealthy? Are you feeling intrigued and open to researching this—and possibly changing your habits as a consequence? Or do you feel validated because the alternative information wouldn’t convince you to change your ways?) Explain your answer.
In the last chapter, we showed how your mind fabricates your present by filling in your visual and aural blind spots with assumed information and interpreting events so they reflect well on you.
We’ll conclude Part 2 by describing how you fabricate your imaginings of the future. Because your imagination is the faculty most relevant to Gilbert’s overarching argument that you make poor choices about the future based on bad information, we’ll spend time first explaining why and how you imagine the future in the first place. We’ll then move on to the types of fabrications your mind makes about the future.
Gilbert writes that humans’ most basic desire in life is to be happy and that every action we take is in service of achieving happiness. Imagining the future is one important way for us to increase our happiness. We can define “imagining the future” as thinking about future scenarios and who we might be in the future, as well as planning for both, explains Gilbert.
(Shortform note: It’s easy to confuse the concept of “imagining” as Gilbert describes it with the idea of “fantasizing” or “daydreaming.” But whereas imagining the future is functional and goal-oriented, we fantasize and daydream for entertainment, distraction, or sexual arousal. Nonetheless, even fantasies and daydreams can be a way to maximize happiness: Children who daydream tend to be more creative, and adults who daydream tend to be more productive. Both creativity and productivity, in turn, can make you happier.)
Imagining the future increases your happiness for two reasons:
You’re more likely to imagine good futures than bad ones, writes Gilbert, and this makes the act of imagining pleasurable. Often, just imagining something is more enjoyable than it occurring. For instance, you’ve undoubtedly spent many pleasant hours thinking about an upcoming weekend or party only for the event to not live up to expectations.
(Shortform note: Gilbert claims that you’re more likely to envision positive future events than negative ones, which makes thinking about the future inherently enjoyable. But even imagining negative future events doesn’t necessarily make you unhappy. This is because you can come up with compelling explanations for why those negative events won’t occur. Therefore, no matter what you envision, the act of imagining can be pleasurable.)
According to Gilbert, a second, arguably more influential reason why imagining the future maximizes your happiness is that it convinces you that you can take action to change the future. That sense of agency makes you happy.
For instance, if you imagine that in the future, your kids will want to go to college, you can exert control over the future by starting to save money for their college funds now. This feeling of preparedness and power makes you happier.
(Shortform note: The idea that you can gain control of your life by thinking about the future also appears in Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule. There, though, Cardone advocates for thinking about the future and taking action to bring about desired outcomes not as a means of becoming happier, but as a means of becoming more successful. He recommends that to be maximally successful, you set ambitious goals for the future and take full responsibility for and control of your life to accomplish them.)
The feeling that you have control over your life is not only happiness-maximizing but also critical to your well-being and mental health, adds Gilbert. We need to feel that we have agency; otherwise, we become depressed or despondent. Gilbert adds that this control can simply be imagined: To be happy, we don’t have to be in control—we just need to believe we are.
(Shortform note: Gilbert presents the feeling of being in control as wholly positive and critical for well-being. However, in some cases, that feeling can lead to negative outcomes, like when people believe they have more control than they really do. When people perceive themselves to have unrealistically high degrees of control over their lives, they suffer from what’s called an illusion of control. This can cause irrational behavior like magical thinking—believing you can catalyze events by willing them to happen, rather than taking concrete action.)
We’ve just described why you envision the future: because doing so makes you happy. We’ll now describe the basic mechanics of how you imagine things and events.
Gilbert says that you imagine things and events using images, experiences, and memories already stored in your brain. For instance, when prompted to imagine a werewolf, your brain summons images of werewolves you’ve seen in movies. Your brain must use existing references to imagine things, emphasizes Gilbert: Without an existing reference, your brain can’t imagine something. This is why, if someone asks you to imagine a “sneedle,” you can’t do it because you have no stored images of a sneedle.
(Shortform note: In the same way it’s impossible for us to imagine something we have no prior reference for, as Gilbert argues, it’s often impossible for writers of sci-fi works to imagine facets of the future for which there are no current references. For example, the 1991 film Until the End of the World, predicted that we’d be using video-pay phones in 1999. At the time of the movie’s making, the scriptwriter perhaps could not conceive of a personal mobile device that made video calls.)
Now that we’ve explained why you imagine the future and the basic mechanics of imagining, let’s turn to the three ways your brain fabricates your vision of the future:
Gilbert writes that you fabricate visions of the future that reflect events and experiences you’ve already been through, rather than new events and experiences yet to come. This is because, as described above, when you imagine future scenarios, your brain uses existing references—your current experiences and memories. The result, concludes Gilbert, is that your visions of the future don’t reflect what the future will be like.
Let’s see this in action: You discover you’ve won a prize at work, which your supervisor calls “amazing office swag.” You’ll receive this prize at the end of the day. You spend the rest of the day imagining what the prize will be, and you can only use your existing images or memories of “office swag” to do this. Perhaps in the past, you received a new cell phone as office swag, or you remember that your friend once won a car from her company. You therefore imagine that at the end of the day, you’ll receive a new cell phone and a car.
However, when the time comes, you only receive a mouse pad and a t-shirt. In this way, you’ve fabricated a vision of the future based only on existing images and memories, and this fabricated vision of the future ends up being incorrect.
The Upside of Using Existing References
Here, Gilbert presents using past experiences as references when predicting the future as wholly unhelpful, as this process often leads you to fabricate improbable future scenarios. This begs the question: Can using past experiences as references ever be helpful?
In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke suggests that this process can be helpful when making decisions in the present. She calls the act of thinking about past experiences (and imagining future scenarios) “mental time travel” and argues that this process helps you make more rational decisions. According to Duke, mental time travel forces you to use the deliberative part of your brain, which takes into account all possible information when making a choice. This includes helpful information about the past that you can use as a reference for good present decisions.
For instance, imagine you’re deciding whether or not to eat a fifth cookie. You use mental time travel to reflect on past scenarios when you ate five cookies in quick succession and remember that doing so made you feel unwell. You use this past experience as a reference for a positive present decision: You decide not to eat the cookie and consequently avoid nausea.
The second way your mind fabricates your view of the future is by omitting available yet unpleasant information from your predictions, writes Gilbert—particularly unpleasant information that questions the version of the future that you want to play out or believe will play out. Your mind does this because, as we saw in Part 2.2 when discussing interpreting the present, it prefers to consume information that supports your existing beliefs and ignore information that doesn’t.
This inclination to ignore undesirable information means you might create an image of the future that’s unrealistically positive. Here’s an example: You’re deciding between buying a gorgeous Victorian home that needs a lot of work and a newer yet less charming home. You know—perhaps even from previous experience—that the Victorian will have structural problems due to its age and be expensive to repair. But because you love the idea of living in a beautiful old home, you omit these shortcomings from your vision of your life in the Victorian home and buy it anyway. Once you’ve bought it, though, you’ll be unhappy with the amount and cost of repairs required.
(Shortform note: Gilbert suggests we omit disadvantageous information from our vision of the future because we don’t like to consider details that challenge our beliefs. But there might be an additional explanation for this tendency to leave out critical details: Our brains can only process a finite amount of information at a time. This means that in situations in which there’s a lot of information to consider—which house to buy, for instance—we simply can’t process it all. Our brains may then prioritize the advantageous information over the disadvantageous information, because, as Gilbert writes, it’s more appealing.)
The final way you fabricate the future relates to the distant future, asserts Gilbert: You fabricate your view of distant future events by confusing a vague image of the distant future for what will actually happen in the distant future.
Here’s how this happens, according to Gilbert: You can’t predict the distant future well because there are too many unknowns. Therefore, when you try to imagine events in your life, say, 10 years from now, you can only create a vague picture of them. You might imagine yourself owning a house and being promoted but be unable to get more specific than that. However, continues Gilbert, you don’t realize that your image of the future is vague, and you believe this is exactly what your future will look like.
Using a Cultural Life Script to Envision the Distant Future
Gilbert argues that we mistakenly think a vague vision of the distant future is an accurate and detailed depiction of what the future will be like. But what do we base our vague visions of the distant future on in the first place? Gilbert doesn’t say, but we may rely on what’s called a cultural life script: the usual series of events that someone follows over their lifetime in a given culture. Cultural life scripts differ across the world and may involve milestones like graduating from college, getting married, and starting a family.
Beyond influencing how you think about the distant future, cultural life scripts even impact how you remember your past. Research suggests that you’re more likely to recall life events contained within your cultural life script. This means that you more vividly remember your twenties and thirties because these decades contain many seminal life script events: graduating from college, getting your first job, finding a spouse, starting a family, and so on.
Recognize when you might not be considering unfavorable or negative information when envisioning future events and situations.
Think of a recent event or situation you looked forward to but that went wrong in some way. How did you picture the event or situation in your imagination? Be as specific as possible. (For instance, you might have looked forward to your birthday party, thinking about the friends you’d see and gifts you’d receive.)
During this event, what negative moments occurred that you hadn’t imagined beforehand? Describe these briefly. (Perhaps you actually spent most of the day lamenting the fact that you’re getting older.)
Now consider: Could you have known in advance that these negative moments would occur, based on how past situations played out? What information about the past could have helped you to predict the negative moments? (For instance, you might feel bad about getting older on your birthday every year. Reflecting more deeply on your memories of previous birthdays would have helped you to realize this.)
Moving forward, how can you consciously acknowledge potential negative facets of a future scenario to avoid feeling disappointed again? How might you create a fuller, more balanced vision of the future? Jot down as many ideas as you can. (For instance, you might think of one potential negative aspect of a future scenario for every positive one. Or, you might mentally step through a previous occurrence of the scenario in detail so you don’t overlook the negative things that occurred and may happen again.)
We’ve just outlined the first part of Gilbert’s main argument: that your brain fabricates your perception of the past, present, and future. Now let’s move on to the second part of his main thesis: how this fabricated reality leads you to make decisions about the future that aren’t conducive to happiness.
To present this part of the argument, we’ll first show that you lack awareness that your brain fabricates your reality. We’ll then describe how this lack of awareness makes you happier now but eventually forms the foundation for poor decision-making that results in your unhappiness.
Though you always supplement memories with assumed information, interpret events in the present positively, and imagine improbable futures, you don’t recognize you do this, says Gilbert. You believe you see, remember, and imagine the world exactly as it is and that your memories, experience of the present, and imaginings of the future are therefore objectively correct.
(Shortform note: According to Gilbert, you fabricate your entire reality but believe incorrectly that you perceive it objectively. However, this view may be too extreme: Sometimes, you do perceive the world objectively. For instance, when you touch a rose, you don’t fabricate your reality of being in pain—you experience the pain objectively. On the other hand, when your friend fails to smile at you and you’re immediately certain they’re mad at you, you’re fabricating your reality to a higher degree.)
Your lack of awareness that you’re constantly fabricating your reality is in some ways good, writes Gilbert, because it lets you enjoy a “blissfully ignorant” happiness in the present. As we’ve shown, your brain goes to great lengths to ensure you’re as happy as possible now: As we discussed, it uses five techniques to interpret events in the present to reflect well on you, and it creates fabricated visions of the future because doing so is pleasurable and the perceived control over your life makes you happy. Gilbert contends that if you saw through this positive interpretation of the present and recognized that your vision of the future was fundamentally incorrect, you wouldn’t be as happy as often.
Being Happier While Also Being Aware
Gilbert says your present happiness results from ignorance that you’re fabricating your reality. However, not everyone agrees that happiness in the current moment need merely be the result of ignorance. You can and should actively choose to be happy in the present as often as you can, argues Norman Vincent Peale in The Power of Positive Thinking.
Do this by making a habit of being happy through your thoughts, actions, and lifestyle: Think and behave in ways known to create happiness. For instance, keep your mind free from worry, help others, and live simply.
Unfortunately, continues Gilbert, your happiness rooted in blissful ignorance isn’t permanent. Your lack of awareness that you’re fabricating your reality means you use fabricated, inaccurate memories and experiences to inform your choices about the future. Because these choices are based on falsehoods and overly optimistic imaginings, they often lead to unexpected and poor outcomes, which do not make you happy.
For instance, based on a memory of a short hike you took and think you enjoyed, you fabricate a vague vision of yourself in five years in which you’re climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and enjoying it. This vague and fabricated vision informs your decision to begin training for the climb. However, it turns out this decision makes you miserable because you hate physical exertion. In fact, you hated the physical exertion of your initial short hike, but strategically omitted that negative detail when calling on your memories to create your vision of the Kilimanjaro climb. The choice to climb Kilimanjaro ultimately becomes a poor one because of these delusional imaginings.
Why Don’t All Choices Make Us Happy?
Over the last few chapters, we’ve seen that our brains are wired to keep us as happy as possible as often as possible. This raises the question: If our minds are hard-wired to make us deludedly happy no matter what, why does Gilbert believe that certain decisions about the future make us unhappy? Shouldn’t our positive, fabricated interpretation of the world kick in to allow us to be happy even if we make “wrong,” unhappiness-producing choices about the future, as Gilbert describes above?
We might explain this by saying that certain choices about the future prevent us from using one or more of our previously described happiness-maintaining techniques. For instance, if you join a group of people training to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, you’re no longer surrounding yourself with friends who bolster your belief that climbing the mountain will be fun and easy. Instead, you’re surrounded by experienced people who tell you that the climb will be incredibly difficult—and this erodes your happiness as a result of your choice.
In the last part, we described the second part of Gilbert’s main argument: that your lack of awareness that you fabricate your reality leads you to make poor choices. We’ll now move on to the final part of Gilbert’s main argument: six specific poor choices about the future that leave you unhappy.
According to Gilbert, you make choices about the future that are based on feelings you have now. Because how you’re feeling now may not reflect how you’d feel about the choice in the future, this can lead to poor decisions.
To explain this further, let’s first return to an idea we explored in Part 2.3: that your mind envisions the future using existing references (your current experiences and memories). Gilbert notes that when you’re considering a future choice, your mind pictures what that choice will look like using references from your past and present. You then have an emotional reaction to this picture in your mind, and this emotional reaction informs your decision—you’ll opt for the choice if you have a positive emotional reaction to the image of it.
Problems arise when your brain is already experiencing a strong emotional reaction to something in the present. In such cases, your brain focuses on your present feeling—ignoring the true future emotional reaction to the scenario you’ve imagined—and transposes it onto your imagined future scenario. You thus think your present feeling applies to the choice you’re considering for your future, even if your present emotion has nothing to do with the choice at hand. This can lead you to, say, reject a choice that would make you happy just because you’re feeling sad in the present.
For instance, imagine you’re considering moving to Miami. On the day you’re making the choice, you feel fairly neutral—you have no strong emotions in the present. When deciding whether or not to make the move, you conjure up an image of Miami as it appears in your memories: warm and sunny. This image makes you feel good—you love warm climates! Therefore, you conclude that you should move to Miami because doing so will likely make you feel good.
Now, imagine that you’re making this choice on a day when you’re incredibly angry due to a recent breakup. When you imagine Miami, your brain transposes your anger onto the mental image—you think that living in Miami would irritate you because it would be hot and uncomfortable all the time (even though really, you love the heat). You therefore decide against the move based not on how you’d actually feel about living in Miami, but based on how you’re feeling right now. This is a poor choice that sabotages an attempt at future happiness.
Thinking Rationally, Not Emotionally
Gilbert’s description of how we accidentally transpose current feelings onto imagined future scenarios suggests that we’re doomed to make bad choices based on misplaced emotions. However, there may be a way to circumvent this issue: by using logic-driven tools to assess your choices, rather than relying on your possibly flawed emotions to make decisions.
One way to do this is by implementing a rigorous decision-making process in a spreadsheet:
Step 1: State the goal of your decision—for instance, to move to a new city where you can live for the next 10 years.
Step 2: Brainstorm options for achieving this goal. In this case, you’d write down cities you’re considering.
Step 3: Define a set of criteria by which you’ll judge each option. At this point, rather than having an emotional reaction to your memories of both cities and making a decision based on that reaction, you’d instead decide what living criteria matter to you: cost of living, proximity to public transit, and so on.
Step 4: Assign a degree of importance to each criterion. You might value the cost of living over proximity to public transit, as you’re on a budget.
Step 5: Define questions about how well each option fits the criteria. You might define the question “What is the average cost of a condo in each city?”
Step 6: Perform rounds of research to answer the questions and rank the different options based on your findings and the degree of importance of each criterion. (Don’t be afraid to re-rank the options based on new information as you continue your research.)
You also make poor choices about the future because you mispredict the amount of variety you’ll want across long stretches of time in the future, writes Gilbert. You do this because, as with the first poor choice, you transpose your feelings about the present onto your vision of the future. You know that variety makes you happy in the short term, so you incorrectly think variety will make you happier over long periods of time.
Let’s break this down further: Most of us recognize that our enjoyment of something—playing ping-pong, for instance—decreases the more we do it. It therefore makes sense to vary what you do each day, by swapping ping-pong for tennis every other night, for example. You don’t enjoy tennis as much, but at least by regularly taking a break from ping-pong, your enjoyment of that sport remains high.
However, according to Gilbert, we mistakenly think we’ll also want variety across long stretches of time. In reality, when there are long gaps between occurrences—if you only play ping-pong once a week, for instance—your enjoyment of the activity remains high. But you mistakenly think it won’t, so you begrudgingly swap ping-pong for tennis every other week, even though you don’t really need to. This makes you less happy than sticking with ping-pong each week.
Happiness by the Hour and by the Day
Gilbert claims we make poor choices about the future because we incorrectly think high variety over a long stretch of time will make us happy. Researchers have drilled down even further into the connection between time, variety, and happiness. They’ve looked at happiness and variety in the specific time frames of days and hours to answer the question: What degree of variety makes you happiest over the span of an hour or a day?
It turns out that over the course of a full day, variety helps sustain happiness because you feel excited by performing multiple tasks. However, over the shorter period of an hour, variety decreases happiness because your sense of productivity declines: You don’t feel you’ve accomplished much in the hour due to constantly flitting between tasks, and you waste additional time transitioning from one task to another.
What’s more, the type of activity you’re performing doesn’t matter when it comes to variety decreasing happiness in short timeframes. You’ll have the same negative experience whether you’re introducing too much variety when working for an hour or when enjoying an hour’s free time.
The third poor choice about the future happens because when considering options for the future, you draw ineffective comparisons to the present and the past, writes Gilbert.
(Shortform note: We make poor comparisons in all areas of our lives, not just in thinking about the future, as Gilbert describes. For example, Barry Schwartz writes in The Paradox of Choice that we make ourselves unhappy by comparing our choices not to the present or past but to the choices of others. Such comparisons can erode our happiness by making us feel inferior to others.)
Let’s look in detail at two types of ineffective comparison:
The first bad comparison you make is comparing a choice to other choices that are currently available—not to the other choices you’ll have in the future. Your circumstances may change in the future, and a choice that looks good now compared to your other present options may not look so good later.
Here’s an example: You’re at a small furniture store, considering which of two couches to buy. Couch 1 is both cheaper and more attractive than Couch 2, so you purchase it. However, later that afternoon, you drive by a larger furniture store and see five other couches in the window, all of which are cheaper and more attractive than your just-purchased Couch 1. You made a poor choice because you compared Couch 1 only to the choices currently available—Couch 2—rather than considering that if you visit another store in the future, you might find better couches.
The second bad comparison you make is comparing the future to the past, writes Gilbert. If a choice is more attractive now than it was, say, two months ago, you might opt for that choice, even if a better choice might arise in the future.
For instance, you might purchase an ottoman for $200 because its price has been marked down from two months ago, making it a better choice now than it was previously. However, later that day, you find another ottoman online priced only at $150. Because you compared the $200 ottoman solely to its past price point, you think you got a good deal. In reality, you could have saved more money by considering that you might come across even cheaper ottomans in the future.
Using Delayed Gratification to Leave Room for Future Options
One way to leave room for future options in your deliberations, rather than just making a choice based on present options or comparisons to the past, is to practice delaying gratification. It may be tempting or easy to make a choice now based on available information about present options or changes compared to the past. Furthermore, making a choice quickly based on this accessible information may feel satisfying. But if you can delay the gratification of making the choice, thus delaying the choice itself, you may find yourself able to take advantage of new options that come up in the future.
You can practice delaying gratification by delaying it first by a tiny amount of time—for instance, waiting just an hour before making a choice to see if other options come up—and then slowly increasing the delay time to days or even weeks.
According to Gilbert, the fourth type of poor choice about the future happens because you misjudge how much regret you’ll feel in the future and over what choice. Specifically, you mistakenly think you’ll regret a bold, risky decision and that you won’t regret a safe decision. Because you want to avoid the pain of regret, you often opt for the safe decision. In reality, you’re more likely to regret a safe decision than a bold one, claims Gilbert.
(Shortform note: Gilbert presents regret as a negative feeling to avoid. But in The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argues that you could see regret as fulfilling several positive functions: The threat of regret causes you to seriously consider decisions, rather than making snap choices. Regret in the wake of a bad decision is also a learning tool, he writes, because it tells you how to behave better moving forward. Finally, when you regret something, you’re more likely to fix the situation or make amends with anyone you’ve harmed.)
This error in reasoning occurs, argues Gilbert, because we think that if a big, risky choice goes wrong, we'll feel terrible due to all that we've staked and lost. But this isn't true: As we discussed in Part 3.2, your brain protects you from adversity following big mistakes by finding meaning in what happened and convincing you it happened for a reason. So, even if the risk goes wrong, you won't feel bad. You're more likely to feel bad if a safe bet goes wrong, as it'll likely lead to only minor inconvenience, and as discussed, your brain can't protect you from that.
Let’s look at an example to illustrate this idea: You’re deciding between starting your own business and staying at your current job that you don’t enjoy. Starting your own business is the riskier decision, and you vividly imagine the regret you’ll feel if you fail. Meanwhile, staying at your current job elicits less fear of regret because the risk is smaller. To avoid regret, you therefore opt to stay at your current job.
This is, from a happiness-maximization perspective, the wrong decision. Even if your risky choice to start your own business fails and leads to adversity, your automatic happiness-protecting response will kick in: You’ll derive meaning and learning from the experience, and you won’t regret it. If you stay in your current job, on the other hand, you’ll never be unhappy enough to trigger that happiness-protecting response. You’ll therefore languish in a state of moderate unhappiness, which you’ll regret.
Consciously Protect Your Happiness
One way to overcome the harmful attitude toward regret Gilbert describes here and to increase your comfort with making risky choices is to consciously use the happiness-protecting strategy your mind implements subconsciously. When you force yourself to see potentially devastating outcomes of your risky choices as learning experiences, you won’t fear regretting those choices as much and will be emboldened to make them.
Tony Robbins argues this point in Awaken the Giant Within. He writes that many people passively let life carry them along—we can see this as analogous to constantly making safe, regret-minimizing choices that maintain your status quo. To seize control of your life and make the bold choices required to better it, Robbins writes that you should consciously view bad decisions as learning experiences that improve your sense of judgment in the future.
The fifth type of poor choice you make concerns your desire for freedom: According to Gilbert, you opt for choices that grant you greater freedom in the future, when, in reality, the choices that limit your freedom make you happier.
You’re happier when you have less freedom thanks again to your automatic happiness-protecting response, writes Gilbert. This response triggers when you have little power and few options so that despite this adversity you can still be happy. However, you’re not aware this response will kick in. Therefore, you always make the choice that keeps your options open to avoid the discomfort you think lack of choice will bring.
In reality, having many options makes you unhappy because you constantly doubt yourself, claims Gilbert: Should you choose A or B? Was A the right choice? Should you switch to B? When you’re not locked into a choice, your mind second-guesses, and this produces unhappiness.
Let’s look at an example: You’re deciding between an eight-year biology research program in a remote rainforest that you can’t leave for the duration of the program and an eight-year local program that you can leave if you don’t like it. Which program will you choose?
Most will opt for the second program because they feel it will make them happier in the future to have the option to quit. But, the first program will probably make you happier. Even if you’re initially miserable in the rainforest, your happiness-protecting response will kick in as a protective mechanism. You’ll thus derive meaning and joy from being in the rainforest—for instance, by believing that you’re growing as a person. Meanwhile, if you choose the other program, you’ll wonder if it was the right choice or if you should use your ability to quit and look for something better.
Coping With Many Options
Though Gilbert shows that choices that provide you with fewer liberties make you happier, most people won’t take those liberty-reducing options. Instead, they’ll make choices that give them the flexibility to choose something better later.
Yet soon, those who’ve chosen the flexible option will need to make more choices: to stick with their first choice or to use the flexibility to make a different, better choice. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz describes several strategies for dealing with such choice abundance:
Don’t worry about what you’re missing. Instead, consider if you’re content with your existing choice. If you are, stop looking for better options.
Once you’ve made a decision, stick with it. This is the happiness-maximizing response on a conscious level: recognizing the value of the choice you’ve made and being content that you’ve made it, regardless of what happens.
Be grateful for the positive facets of your choice. Even if your choice isn’t perfect, there are undoubtedly some positive aspects to it. You’ll be happier if you’re thankful for those aspects.
Using these active decision-making strategies can also help you more quickly adjust to a freedom-limiting choice—perhaps even before your automatic happiness-maximizing response kicks in.
The last poor choice you make, writes Gilbert, is thinking you’ll be happier with rational explanations for occurrences than with unsolved or mysterious ones. You think you prefer rational explanations because often, these explanations benefit you. Explaining rationally how or why something occurred allows you to learn and grow from it: For example, if you get into a fender-bender and explain it as being the result of the other driver’s incorrect turn signal, you learn to be wary of turn signals.
Additionally, says Gilbert, you can often rationally explain occurrences in ways that let you feel happier about them. For instance, your explanation of the fender-bender places the fault in the other driver’s hands, not yours, which makes you happy.
However, there’s another angle to consider, claims Gilbert: While humans benefit from creating explanations for incidents, we also benefit from not doing so. This is because unexplained events leave you pondering them for longer than events you explain, which is in itself a pleasurable activity. However, because we’re not conscious of the pleasure of pondering a mystery, says Gilbert, we make choices about the future that provide us with explanations, not uncertainty.
Here’s an example: A literary magazine has accepted your short story, and you receive feedback from the magazine. You’ll likely devour this information, as you feel it will make you happy to hear what you did well. While this may be true, you might derive more happiness from not reading the feedback because the mystery of why you were accepted will cause you to think about it for longer, prolonging your pleasure.
The Pleasure of Mystery in Stories
Gilbert isn’t the only person to pick up on the happiness-prolonging powers of mystery. Filmmaker JJ Abrams has used big, unsolved mysteries as devices in many of his shows and films, most notably the TV series Lost. But Abrams goes beyond his own work to describe all stories as containers of mystery: At each moment, the narrative asks a new question and presents a new mystery. Once that mystery is solved, a new one arises. This is, according to Abrams, the basic format of all good stories and the best way to keep an audience entertained and happy.
Abrams also believes that in life, mystery and unknowns mean possibility, hope, and potential. Mysteries drive imagination, he says—when something is unexplained, you can come up with your own exciting stories to explain it.
Nonetheless, he concedes, as does Gilbert, that rational explanations are also often necessary to your audience’s—and your—happiness. While stories must create mysteries, stories must also solve the mysteries to satisfy viewers and keep them engaged.
Consider the effects of risky and safe choices, and explore which type of choice you might ultimately pursue.
Briefly describe a recent choice you had to make between something risky and something safe. (For instance, you might have been deciding between staying in and going to a party where you didn’t know anyone.)
What did you feel was at stake if you made the risky choice? What did you feel you’d gain by making the safe choice? List as many risks and gains as you can. (For example, you might have feared having no one to talk to if you go to the party. On the other hand, if you stayed in, you could watch TV and be comfortable.)
Now, knowing that you find meaning in adversity following poor decisions, what might be some ways you would have justified or derived meaning from the risky choice if it went poorly? Conversely, what would you lose by making the safe choice? (For example, if you went to the party and you didn’t know anyway, you might have justified attending as a good choice because you learned how to make better small talk. If you made the safe choice, though, you would have regretted not having the chance to meet someone new.)
Based on your answers to the above, if you had the chance again, would you make the risky choice or the safe choice? Explain your answer.
In the last part, we described six types of poor choices you can make about your future. Now, let’s conclude by talking about potential solutions to correct these poor choices—and why, in Gilbert’s view, none of these solutions work.
We’ll first cover solutions based on personal experience—in other words, using your memories of past events to correct your decision-making in the future. We’ll then talk about solutions based on the insights of others—using the experiences and learning of others to inform your decision-making.
You might be tempted to think that you can use your memory of past poor choices to make better decisions about the future, writes Gilbert. But this is impossible because your memory is faulty in several ways we’ve already discussed: It’s made up of snippets of an experience, not the experience itself, and you constantly rewrite memories based on new information. This means that you rely on fabricated memories when trying to correct decisions, which leads to poor outcomes.
Your memory misrepresents the past and keeps you locked in a cycle of making poor choices about your future in three specific ways:
First, you believe that extraordinary events in your past are more likely to reoccur than they are, writes Gilbert. This means you base decisions on the expectation that extraordinary events will happen, when they probably won’t.
You believe this because your mind recalls memories of extraordinary occurrences more readily than ordinary ones, claims Gilbert. Ordinary events and outcomes—like taking the train and arriving at work without incident—happen all the time, so your mind doesn’t register them as vividly as uncommon events and outcomes—like taking the train and being re-routed to a different city. You therefore overestimate the frequency and dominance of extraordinary events.
This means that when weighing a decision about the future, writes Gilbert, you’ll more readily recall unique, extraordinary instances in the past when the option that normally doesn’t make you happy, did make you happy. Based on this selective memory, you’ll therefore choose the option that probably won’t make you happy, thinking it’s more likely to generate happiness than it really is.
Here’s an example: You subscribe to a monthly wine delivery service and can choose between Plan A, which offers a high variety of wines, or Plan B, which offers a low variety of wines but more wines you enjoy. You’re currently on Plan A, and you need to decide whether to stay on this plan or switch to Plan B.
You have many memories of not enjoying the high variety of Plan A and wishing you’d picked the consistency of Plan B. But when deciding which plan to continue with, your mind will favor a memory of an extraordinary instance in which you preferred the high variety of Plan A. Your mind won’t rely on the ordinary majority of your memories in which you disliked high variety. Therefore, despite your intention to correct your decision-making, you still make a poor choice by re-selecting Plan A based on your more easily recalled yet extraordinary memory of enjoying it on one occasion.
Using Uncommon Experiences and Overcomplicated Considerations
Gilbert claims that because your mind highlights memories of strange occurrences over commonplace ones, you believe strange events are more likely to occur in the future than they really are. You therefore base your choices about the future on uncommon past events.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes a similar way your brain triggers poor decisions: by overcomplicating those decisions. Rather than relying on straightforward information and simple considerations—tantamount to using memories of commonplace occurrences to inform our choices—we give more weight to unimportant factors and favor complicated considerations over simple ones—which is similar to using unusual, extraordinary memories to inform our choices.
In this way, when considering which wine delivery plan to get, you might use unimportant factors and make a complicated consideration by thinking: “If I have a big dinner party next year, I’ll need a wide variety of wines. And because I normally don’t drink wine in the summer, I’ll probably want to give away many bottles to friends during that time. I should, therefore, opt for Plan A.” (This complicated consideration could even be based on a memory of a past extraordinary instance in which you did have a big dinner party and required a variety of wines, or one unusual summer in which you gave a lot of wine away.) It would be better, Kahneman would argue, to simply think about what wine you like and then purchase the plan that has the most of that wine.
Another reason Gilbert says you can’t rely on memories to correct your decision-making is that you remember the ends of experiences more than the bulk of experiences. This means you look at a narrow piece of an experience—the end—to inform your decision on whether or not to pursue the whole experience again. If the end doesn’t reflect the overall experience, you make the same mostly-poor choices again and again, laments Gilbert.
For instance, if you went on an amusement park ride that you mostly disliked but which had a great final loop, you might go on the ride again because you recall only the final loop and not the bulk of the ride. This is a poor decision because you disliked the vast majority of the ride: Back on the ride, you’ll wonder why you thought it would be a good idea to do it again. When you get off, though, you’ll once again only recall the great final loop, and this will again lead you back to the mostly-average ride.
(Shortform note: The fact that you remember the end of an event more strongly than the bulk of the event means you can build more happiness into your life by manually improving the ends of experiences. For instance, you might salvage a bad dinner out with friends by going out dancing afterward. Going forward, you’ll remember the great time you had dancing more than the bad dinner, making your memory a generally happy one. You can also use this knowledge to urge yourself through the low points of an experience to get to the payoff. Rather than writing off a bad dinner and heading straight home, stick it out: You can still create a happy memory by ending on a high note.)
The final reason your memories can’t help you correct your decision-making is that you reconstruct memories to reflect how you think you should have felt at the time rather than how you did feel, says Gilbert. This means you don’t remember your true emotional reaction to an event and can’t learn from it.
Here’s an example: You hated going to your sister’s wedding. However, you believe that you should enjoy weddings because everyone enjoys weddings. Therefore, you’ll falsely remember yourself as having been happy at the event. This prevents you from correcting your decision-making in the future, and you’ll RSVP “yes” to another wedding that will, in reality, not be fun for you.
(Shortform note: One way to better remember how you truly felt, rather than how you believe you should have felt, is to journal about your feelings. By noting down when you’re having an intense emotional reaction to an event and what, specifically, you’re feeling, you create a reliable historical account of your feelings to which you can later refer and learn from. Journaling can even help you make sense of your feelings if you’re confused or overwhelmed about an event. This further reduces the chances that you’ll misremember or misinterpret how you felt about that event later.)
We’ve just shown that you can’t correct your decision-making based on your memories, as your brain misrepresents your lived experiences. Because you don’t recall experiences as they actually happened, you make the same bad decisions over and over.
Let’s now look at learning from the insights of others. If we can’t use our own experiences to make better choices, can we use the experiences of those who’ve made similar choices in the past? Unfortunately, writes Gilbert, we could, but we don’t. This is for two reasons: We believe the incorrect information we receive from others, and we ignore the correct information we receive from others.
(Shortform note: There are likely additional reasons beyond the two Gilbert outlines for why we don’t act on the insights of others. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes that our pride can prevent us from accepting hard evidence that we were wrong about something in the past. Our pride can conceivably also cause us to ignore evidence from others that we may be wrong about the future: If we think we’ll ace a test, we may ignore the warning of someone who already took the test and found it difficult because believing them would mean accepting our initial assessment was wrong.)
Let’s look at each reason in more detail:
Gilbert writes that we often believe inaccurate information about what makes us happy because of the nature of that particular information: Some incorrect information about happiness is able to perpetuate itself because it encourages people to take the actions that spread it. Let’s illustrate this using the incorrect information that having kids makes you happy:
Your parents pass this information on to you at a young age, and you later act on it by having kids. You then tell your kids that having their own kids will make them happy, since you believe it’s true—it’s what everyone always told you, after all. Eventually, your kids have kids, too, who they tell to have kids, and the cycle continues. In this way, the information “having kids makes you happy” self-perpetuates, because it encourages people to keep producing the next generation who’ll learn and spread the information.
Yet, argues Gilbert, this information is incorrect: People with kids aren’t happy. They report low levels of happiness from childbirth until their kids go to college. The reason we perpetuate this lie is because of Correction Error #3: We remember feeling the way we believe we should have felt while parenting—happy and rewarded—not the way we actually felt: unhappy and tired.
This type of self-perpetuating information is essential to the continuation of humanity as a whole, not to the happiness of the individual, contends Gilbert. For us to survive as a species, we need to believe this information about what will make us happy, even though it’s untrue. We see this clearly in the example of “having kids makes you happy”—if we didn’t believe having kids makes us happy, none of us would have kids, and our species would die out.
You therefore can’t make better choices about the future using the insights of others because virtually all humans buy into and spread the same poor, self-perpetuating information about happiness, concludes Gilbert. That poor information may help our species to succeed, but it also forms the basis of decisions that leave you personally unhappy.
(Shortform note: Gilbert claims that there are certain ideas about what will make us happy that all humans “fall for” simply because we need to fall for them to keep humanity afloat. This could make us feel like unthinking cogs in a survival machine. Yet while this notion can be disheartening, some have proposed that while our genes undeniably want human life to continue, individual humans can still construct meaning beyond procreation for their own lives. We can make the world a better place through altruistic action, for instance, and in that way, we can defy the notion that we’re just tools used for some higher purpose.)
Parental Happiness Around the World
Gilbert claims that the belief that having kids makes you happy is a lie, pointing to studies that show American parents are unhappy from the time their child is born until that child departs for college. However, parental happiness levels differ around the world, and not all parents are as unhappy as the American ones Gilbert describes.
Of 22 surveyed countries, the US had the highest gap between parental and non-parental happiness: 12%. Some countries also reported lower levels of parental happiness than nonparental happiness, but many countries have parents who are happier than nonparents. Among them are Russia, France, and, topping the charts with eight-percentage-points-greater parental happiness, Portugal.
Part of the reason why American parents report low happiness may be due to the lack of workplace support and paid time off for working parents. Being a parent in the US is also more expensive than elsewhere, particularly when you factor in college tuition, which is higher than in other countries.
According to Gilbert, you also fail to correct your future decision-making because you don’t listen to correct information from others about what will make you happy. It’s technically possible to make better choices by finding out how others feel after making those choices. However, you don’t heed their insights as you don’t believe others’ feelings can apply to you, Gilbert asserts. This is because all humans believe their experience of life is more unique than it is. In reality, though, our lived experience and feelings about those experiences can quite easily mirror other people’s.
For instance, you’re considering taking a management position at your company. The previous incumbent warns you not to do so, as they were miserable in the job—the boss was too demanding and the team was difficult to manage.
It’s likely that you’d face the same issues if you took the job since the boss and team members in question are still working for the company and are still just as difficult to work with. However, you ignore the incumbent’s advice because you believe you’re uniquely placed to handle these challenges: You worked with a difficult manager in the past, so you figure you’re resilient enough to cope with a similar situation again. You take the job, but you end up miserable—even with your uniquely resilient temperament, the boss and team members are so persistently combative that you find them difficult to handle. You should have heeded the previous manager’s words.
(Shortform note: Gilbert argues that we limit our ability to improve our decision-making by thinking that the opinions and experiences of others can’t apply to us because we’re too unique. However, that’s not the only misconception that keeps us from listening to others: We also believe that we’re above average in every way and therefore better than everyone around us. This is called the better-than-average effect and can similarly lead to poor choices about the future. For instance, if you think you’re a better swimmer than your friend, you might head into waters they claim are dangerous because you think you can manage better than they can—even though this poses a threat to your safety.)