Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

(This document is still in progress.)

Chapter Notes and Highlights

Chapter 7: Time Bombs

Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one's experiences. Another way to beat habituation is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience.

The point here is that time and variety are two ways of avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don't need the other. In fact, when episodes are sufficiently separated in time, variety is not only unnecessary -- it can actually be costly.

So how do we decide how we will feel about things that are going to happen in the future? The answer is that we tend to imagine how we would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing. ... The problem with this method of making judgments is that starting points have a profound impact on ending points.

The way we feel right now and the way we think right now exert an unusually strong influence on the way we think we'll feel later.

The human brain is not particularly sensitive to the absolute magnitude of stimulation, but it is extraordinarily sensitive to differences and changes -- that is, to the relative magnitude of stimulation.

Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible. And that is indeed what I ought to be doing because it really doesn't matter what coffee cost the day before, the week before, or at any time during the Hoover administration.

Chapter 8: Paradise Glossed

Most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma... The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don't affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.

When your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretation of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency, and recency do.

If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers. ... We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion.

We might think of [people] as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness. ... A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it.

When it comes to collecting and analyzing facts about ourselves and our experiences, most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in Really Bad Science. ... Not only do we select favorable facts from magazines, we also select them from memory. ... We spend countless hours and countless dollars carefully arranging our lives to ensure that we are surrounded by people who like us, and people who are like us.

This tendency to seek information about those who have done more poorly than we have is especially pronounced when the stakes are high. People with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer are particularly likely to compare themselves with those who are in worse shape ...

Apparently it doesn't take much to convince us that we are smart and healthy, but it takes a whole lotta facts to convince us of the opposite.

Chapter 9: Immune to Reality

We may be able deliberately to generate positive views of our own experiences if we close our eyes, sit very still and do nothing else, but research suggests that if we become even slightly distracted, these deliberate attempts tend to backfire and we end up feeling worse than we did before.

People expect to feel equally bad when a tragic accident is the result of human negligence as when it is the result of dumb luck, but they actually feel worse when luck is dumb and no one is blameworthy.

People of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than things they did. [In case of inaction] we can't console ourselves by thinking of all the things we learned from the experience because, well, there wasn't one.

Because these volunteers suffered greatly, the intensity of their suffering triggered their defensive systems, which immediately began working to help them achieve a credible and positive view of their experience. ... If you've managed to forgive your spouse for some egregious transgression but still find yourself miffed about the dent in the garage door or the trail of dirty socks on the staircase, then you have experienced this paradox.

Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not.

We are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we're stuck with than of the things we're not. ... It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience.

Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen. Our failure to anticipate that inescapability will trigger our psychological immune systems (hence promote our happiness and satisfaction) can cause us to make some painful mistakes.

If keeping our options has benefits, it also has costs.

Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem less likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.

Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case.

Chapter 10: Once Bitten

Despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.

The fact that the least likely experience is often the most likely memory can wreak havoc with our ability to predict future experiences. ... This tendency to recall and rely on unusual instances is on of the reasons why we so often repeat mistakes.

Memory's fetish for endings explains why women often remember childbirth as less painful than it actually was, and why couples whose relationships have gone sour remember that they were never really happy in the first place.

... Apparently, the way an experience ends is more important to us than the total amount of pleasure we receive -- until we think about it.

Our brains use facts and theories to make guesses about past events, and so too do they use facts and theories to make guesses about past feelings. Because feelings do not leave behind the same kinds of facts that presidential elections and ancient civilizations do, our brains must rely even more heavily on theories to construct memories of how we once felt.

We remember feeling as we believe we must have felt.