Stumbling Upon Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert (2009)

This is quite some book!  There is a lot more to it than I had initially predicted, which in retrospect is strange as the first bit of the book did set one up with a challenging question - (why are humans so bad at predicting what will make them happy?) - which would seemingly demand pretty big answers, but I still thought that it was likely that the book would be a bit sketchy somehow! 

Perhaps that was partly the cover, which quite possibly does predispose one to think that this book isn't up for anything too weighty. Or perhaps it was another problem of priming, ie: that I had recently read a few books that whilst they weren't exactly short of content, had laboured the point a bit more than this one does and I had therefore made a false predication as to the extent and nature of the content based upon recent books I had read rather than my other awareness of the need for big answers.

As it happens, this problem of priming, although Gilbert doesn't label it as such, is one of many that he addresses in answering the question. Actually, this book is so packed full of evidence from one study or another and extrapolated argument and explanation, that it is all the reader can do to keep up to speed with retaining it all as one goes along.  Once it had dawned on me that this was a problem, I resorted to using tricks from my recent reading of "The Memory Book" in this regard and it did help.  The method Key/Link worked pretty well as a novice to this.  For example, I linked some Brazilian money (real) being given as a present that was strapped to a missile that was about to be intercepted by anti-missile technology whilst a terrorist blew up a house somewhere below, and Oskar Schindler was rescuing people from the house, making them free but highly critical of their choices when it came to choosing which way they would run.

Yup that looks like nonsense, but it makes sense to me and has helped me retain a large bundle of the messages that I would otherwise have forgotten.  (Try The Memory Book...it does help!)

There is one big problem with Stumbling upon Happiness that I haven't yet resolved and explaining this could be a bit of a spoiler, so look away if you don't want to find out what happens in the last chapter!

My problem is that Gilbert suggests that you ask others who are currently engaged in whatever it is you are proposing for yourself in order to get an idea of how happy it is likely to make you.  The thing is, his previous exposition of the way humans assess their mood suggests that no-one is likely to give you a very objective answer, so it may be that you are about to have your head chopped of, but because it is an objectively ghastly predicament, you concentrate hard on rationalising the situation to the point where you can joyfully announce that you are radiantly happy.  Ho hum.  This seems like a flaw that is not addressed.

A lot of the book looks to me to be a fleshing out of informal fallacies or cognitive error; in other words it's about what poor thinking looks like in the real. It is therefore a rather more accessible version of Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", with a few other books about memes thrown in at the last minute.

I haven't done a full inventory as to whether Gilbert's ideas pass muster with my new benchmark in the field of emotion, ie: Feldman Barrett's "How Emotions are Made" and really should undertake another reading whilst bearing Barrett in mind, but I suspect "Stumbling on Happiness" would scrape by since Gilbert is talking about the cultural assessment of happiness, rather than trying to define its nature.

Overall: 8/10.