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Stumbling on Happiness
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Stumbling on Happiness
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Stumbling on Happiness
Audiobook7 hours

Stumbling on Happiness

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we're so lousy at predicting what will make us happy - and what we can do about it.

Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward.

Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn't gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off?

Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editor's Note

A laugh’s in your future…

Gilbert shows how, just as nostalgia makes the past rosier than it was, we’re terrible at predicting future happiness. Luckily, we know this book will make you happy, as Gilbert writes with a healthy helping of humor.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 2, 2006
ISBN9780739332238
Unavailable
Stumbling on Happiness

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Reviews for Stumbling on Happiness

Rating: 3.8472637018905473 out of 5 stars
4/5

1,005 ratings60 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I just could not listen to this book anymore. I got to about 40% done and just couldn't do it. I'm not sure what the 5 star people read/heard in the book but I found it a little boring and not really helpful for me. Maybe I wasn't in the mood. Who knows. It was a snooze for me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really liked this book. I was expecting self-help genre writing, actually, based on the title and cover, so I was pleased to discover that this is more of a cognitive psychology science book, geared towards a broader audience but not too badly dumbed down.
    This book covers how we define happiness, how we know if/when we are happy, and how we succeed or fail at predicting what we should choose to make ourselves happy. It also offers suggestions about how we might be more successful at making choices that will lead to more happiness, and certainly helps to make sense of a lot of bizarre human behavior we are probably all so used to that we forget how bizarre it really is.
    I won my copy of this book free through a Goodreads giveaway.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    As a book, I didn't expect this to have cutting-edge research. As a popular book, I didn't expect it to be dry and technical.

    It met both of these criteria, and I can't honestly say that I was disappointed with it. It's written in an entertaining if slightly condescending style. Most of the material was not new to me—I'd done a lot of reading online about these topics already.

    It did stimulate a lot of interesting thoughts during a week when I felt more like reading books than blog posts, although I'm not sure if any of them stuck. However, I can't help but feel that it should be possible to give more information about the actual studies and let the reader make up their own mind about what conclusions are warranted, even in a popular science book. There is little mention of how strong an effect is or whether there are other possible explanations.

    The big secret advice at the end is to take an outside view—that is, assume you aren't special and are in fact equal to the statistical average of other people. (The author describes this as advice almost no one will take, even though it would make them more accurate.) Fair enough; many people probably haven't really considered the outside view. But the lack of accommodation for actual knowledge of one's own differences from the statistical average make the advice seem extreme, and I fear will lead readers to reject it wholesale.

    I don't know of a better book, so I can't say reading this is a bad idea for someone who's not familiar with the research suggesting we make systematic errors in forecasting what will make us happy. Just be aware of some of the pitfalls.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an enjoyable book, at times laugh-aloud funny, but always serious. The topics he covers have been covered before, but I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading about them so much. Gilbert states that we often don't really know what makes us happy; that we often do things believing they will make us happy, but we misjudge because we base our future on the memories of our past. Often, those memories are unreliable. These thoughts aren't new, but the way Gilbert presents them is and it is worth the laughs you'll get to read them.It did slow down a little toward the end, the density of the information building, but Gilbert does a good job of keeping it accessible and fun.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I've tried to get through this book three different times, and I just can't. I don't like Gilbert's writing style. He spends too much time trying to be amusing; it obscures any meaningful content that might be there.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book gifts you a great insight to how brain decides and how to compensate the shortcomings of it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It is a good read with good stories but I couldn't find a good relation with happiness until the end of it and it was very brief
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    stumbling on happiness is very insightful, intelligent and entertaining! 4.5
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great read indeed. I now see the TED talks as having been unnecessary spoilers. A both intriguing and enlightening work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Whew. Great content and ideas but holy crap does the author love to beat a dead horse, particularly with metaphors. Painful at points. Also, reading some of the obscure and silly experiments that psychologists do makes me question what the heck they are doing with their time...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It only took me years to get thru this book! It was very interesting and took thought in nearly every sentence. I would read for a while and then put it down to read something more fun. Very thought provoking. I should read it again to absorb the information deeper. (but I probably won't)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a quantification of the psychology of happiness. The author made the effort to make it readable and relatable but it didn’t work. It did not make me happy. I do not recommend unless you are hard core into psych.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book full of useful information.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    so far is the best book on the philosophy of how us humans seek happiness
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a fascinating and sometimes funny book that shows how amazing our brains are and how hard they work to make life easy for us. Not always a good thing!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the best book ever on psychology!!! It is not necessarily a book on how to be happy. Rather it is a book that explains why we often make choices that we think will make us happy but they dont! By understanding the limitation of our mind, we might understand why we feel what we feel and hopefully make the choices that will not disaapoint us and perhaps in the end make us happier!

    Dan Gilbert is an excellent auther that presents serious subject in a very humorus way and I must say reading the book was fun all along!

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I heard about this book on the Freakonomics podcast and was instantly intrigued. This is not a self-help book on how to be happy - it’s a rigorous scientific examination of why we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. And it’s extremely thought-provoking!Gilbert is a fast talker, but otherwise he does an excellent job with the audio narration. He presents compelling evidence to support his ideas, and I was totally with him, point for point, until the very end, when he tries to argue that the drive to accumulate wealth and have kids is a sort of self-propagating social conspiracy basically unrelated to personal happiness. I couldn’t really get on board with that, but it’s a side argument that’s not critical to the main idea.But whether you buy all of Gilbert’s arguments or not, Stumbling on Happiness is still a really interesting read, and I guarantee that you will find something in it that relates to your own experiences in some way. It’s not a long book, but it’s dense with ideas. Humor interspersed throughout keeps it from getting dry. Overall, this is a fascinating listen that I’m very glad I came across and will definitely be chewing over for a while.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Oy. How to talk about this frustrating book. Very funny, but I'm sure some readers would get turned off by his style of wit as it does kinda get old. Lots of insights into how the mind works, but the relevance of those insights is in question.* And who is the audience? I read a lot of popular science books about the brain, the mind, psychology, biology - and anyone with any more training than I would probably be even more frustrated by the author's lack of rigor. But I don't think your average Costco shopper would be interested, either... but maybe they're a good audience because apparently they have trouble realizing that an even bigger TV screen will not necessarily make them happier....

    Gilbert's theory is that we humans are very bad at predicting what will make our future selves happy, and therefore we make poor choices too often and those choices could be avoided if we listened to others' advice more. But he didn't take into account arguments, anecdotes, or research that would reveal weaknesses in his theory. Yes: our brains do a lot of different things (optical illusions, rationalization, rose-colored glasses, etc.) that can mislead us. And yes: reading others' reviews of products we're going to buy, for example, is helpful. But I don't think what college students predict about their enjoyment of pizza is relevant to my decision to move to a smaller yard-free home. Nor do I think that asking someone who lives in a smaller home is a great strategy because after all, we *are* (despite Gilbert's claims) all different people with different tastes, interests, and values.

    Read this book if you're interested in pop psychology, and/or if you have trouble making decisions that don't reflect what you could've learned from experience. Enjoy the ideas Gilbert shares. But my advice for you to find happiness is to Pay Attention and Think about what you really believe in and what you really want. Stumbling isn't a good strategy no matter what.

    As the author says, this is not a self-help or how-to book, but a (supposedly) scientific exploration and a theory. Yet I did learn one or two things about myself that will be helpful! It's short and funny, too. So, in the end 3.5 stars, rounded up in comparison to so much other drivel out there.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An interesting look at what makes us happy by an author who concludes that the reason happiness is so difficult to attain is that it's practically impossible to define. When you don't know what you are looking for, how do you know when you've found it?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Might be pretty good if it's the first book you read on this subject.It didn't tell me much I didn't know yet, and found it annoying that sometimes he is being very scientific and skeptical of the things we all believe about ourselves, while at other times he completely relies on "common sense".
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book sited a lot of the same examples as The Paradox of Choice, so much so that at times it felt like The Paradox of Choice was used as a primary resource in writing this book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Professor Daniel Gilbert discusses why it is so difficult to correctly imagine the future, especially our emotional futures. In personal terms: why are we so bad at figuring out what makes us happy? Professor Gilbert argues that we are misled by several useful tricks that our brains use to construct our world. First, the brain only stores the highlights of emotions, then fills in the details to construct memories. This leads to considerable distortion in our memories, particularly for emotional experiences. Second, even in the present, we fail to notice the ordinary, the everyday, or whatever might be missing. It’s rather like realizing how important something is only when it’s gone. Third, our ability to imagine the future is limited by our faulty memories, by the details our minds necessarily exclude, and by “presentism”, the tendency to assume that the future is going to look a whole lot like the present.Witty, accessible, Gilbert takes us on a surprising tour of our brains while showing them to be the marvelous constructors of our pasts and our presents. Unfortunately, they are not very good at imagining our futures due to their limitations. This is most true for our emotional experiences and explains why it is so difficult to stumble on happiness.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Why we don’t always judge correctly what’ll make us happy, from a psychology & brain wiring perspective. Interesting, and very entertainingly written. I quibble a bit with the author’s conclusion that the best way to figure out whether something will make you happy is to look at whether it makes other people happy — learning a Bulgarian dance makes me pretty darn happy, but most people find that pretty tedious — but the basic concept makes sense.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What we believe will make us happy will not necessarily make us happy. Moving to California, for example, is widely believed to result in a happier life, but research suggests we'd be better off staying in South Dakota and spending more time with family. Gilbert rounds up the best of the research on happiness and presents it to readers in an enjoyable book replete with witty anecdotes to illustrate ideas. Does money make us happy? Most people behave as though it will but, beyond the level of income requisite for survival, more income does not make us happier. We would be better off working less and having more friendships. If you distill the results of happiness research into principles for living, they bear a remarkable resemblance to many teachings of the great world religions. In a secular society, books like this play an important role by enlightening us rugged individualists as to why more stuff isn't helping. Derek Bok extends Gilbert's ideas into the political sphere in his book, The Politics of Happiness. What if public policy were to concern itself with happiness as a priority instead of focusing on guaranteeing the kind of economic freedom that is bound to result in misery for some and no additional happiness for it's main beneficiaries? I've found the implications of Gilbert's book as interesting as the book itself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the broader genre of psychology / sociology / statistics "why we make decisions" (Freakonomics, Nudge, Sway, Drunkard's Walk, Blunder, Black Swan, Predictably Irrational, Chances Are, Traffic, Critical Mass, Wisdom of Crowds, and all those annoying Malcolm Gladwell books), this one is a refreshingly well-written one that does weigh heavily on the psychology side of my rough genre description.I took a star off because the book (or maybe just me) lost steam as it progressed. The narrative has a somewhat compelling plot structure that aims to show us why imagination fails us, but the forced structure (with formal "summaries" -- what he calls "outlooks" I think -- at the end of chapters), takes something away from the experience. It's like watching a documentary mini-series of self-contained episodes rather than a single unified movie. So it is kind of uninspired. And it feels a bit more academic than most of the others in this genre.That said, I'd recommend this one over many of the others, simply because it is probably more well-written, thoughtful, and "big picture" than some of the others.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent book. This is on my "Re-Read" list. Daniel Gilbert explains how we seek and achieve happiness, and sometimes why we don't. Even after horrific events happen to his - he explains how people adapt to whatever circumstances they find themselves in and find a "baseline" of happiness.Excellent book for people who want to understand why lottery winners are sometimes miserable and how trauma survivors can come to view their circumstances as "the best thing that could happen to them".Enlightening.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Why do humans often fail at making themselves happy? Gilbert answers with a great mixture of humor and psychology.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Gilbert's book is wry, funny and informative. My initial joy at finding such a book was muted as I read, finding little that I could relate to. Now, the point of the book is that the many cited studies show that everyone thinks better of themselves than they can justify, so perhaps I'm in that boat. In the end, though, I found myself frustrated by how little new knowledge I gained. True, the details behind the mechanics of thought, perception, judgement and analysis are fascinating, but only confirm what observant folks have been saying for years.A fun read, but unsatisfying.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Central message: our minds trick us the same way our eyes trick us with visual illusions. And we are foolishly un-aware of the ways it tricks us. The rest of the book is basically a list of psychology experiments backed up by pretty horrible long-winded prose to explain how that applies to our daily lives, sprinkled with annoyingly "witty" jokes. His "wit" was not funny to me, but merely annoying, like someone trying really hard to counteract his innate boring-ness w/ strained jokes. While I did appreciate the science behind this book, I felt that his writing style was bloated and dull (even when the subject matter was so interesting). He seems to think that the more you repeat a thing that is self evident, the more interesting it becomes. Perhaps he also underestimates his reader's ability to get something after reading it a couple of times. He needs a good editor; this book could have been cut down to 150 pages (instead of 240 minus notes). I would recommend reading Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi instead, which is excellently written and researched, and covers a more satisfying aspect of Happiness. This book is still worth reading, though, and works as a good complement because it's nice to have some insight into how we trick ourselves (which Flow really doesn't cover). But this book tackles happiness in a most superficial way; it would be more fitting to say it tackles brain-illusions. It should be called "Brain Illusions: How the mind tricks you daily" instead of "Stumbling on Happiness", which is kind of a misnomer. Overall, Dan Gilbert could've afforded to be a little more ambitious and visionary with all this data.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Some interesting ideas on memory, perception and predicting happiness. But way too long with too many psychological studies. These studies are treated as more factual than they are. While I enjoyed his humor, it was a little overdone.