Vikesh Thourani

Ms. Estlund

English Composition 1212

3 February 2011

Surrogates: The Importance

In Daniel Gilbert’s “Reporting Live from Tomorrow” from the book Stumbling

On Happiness, Gilbert talks about surrogates and how they benefit everyone. Surrogate,

as used in the book, means a person that has personal experience or information about

something the person asking wants to experience or know. The more someone knows

before attempting something without any knowledge, the better that someone can make a

decision as to whether they still want to follow through. Surrogates, used in everyday life,

deem a large roll in the way people look at and think about people, places, and things.

They drive our constant push for knowledge and build upon our basis of understanding of

everything we know.

Gilbert explains that through the use of surrogates, information passes not just to

one person, but also to many due to word of mouth. As far as whether the information

from that surrogate is true or false brings up another point. The person that the surrogate

talks to will end up taking what he/she wants from it and decide whether they want to do

that accordingly. Also, most of what we know comes from what we hear or learn from

others. Gilbert wrote, “If you were to write down everything you know and then go back

through the list and make a check mark next to the things you know only because

someone told you, you’d develop a repetitive-motion disorder because almost everything

you know is secondhand” (Gilbert 170). Our thinking of different things may seem
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wrong, but when asking many other people, a more accurate and clearer picture appears

of something more correct than just imagination. As Gilbert wrote, “There are just two

possibilities. The first is that a lot of the advice we receive from others is bad advice that

we foolishly accept. The second is that a lot of the advice we receive from others is good

advice that we foolishly reject” (Gilbert 170).

What makes someone happy and sad depends upon the culture values that

someone was brought up around. From generation to generation those groups of people

with the same cultural values keep passing them down and it becomes tradition. In this

sense, the people of each generation feed the upcoming generations with the knowledge

they have gained. More important than wealth, knowledge gets one much farther in

everyday life because that wealth can take us only to a certain point before it becomes too

much and just routine. An example used from the text reads, “… Wealth increases human

happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it

does little to increase happiness thereafter” (Gilbert 171). Money does not have the same

value it did before, but knowledge remains something that one will keep all their life.

People that do not confront surrogates about anything tend to use imagination.

Unfortunately, imagination can take someone so far in a real world. Gilbert describes

three shortcomings of imagination by writing of which the first reads, “… imagination’s

first shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us” (Gilbert 178).

Therefore, when imagination takes over, if one does not consult a surrogate, the mind

will fill in bits in pieces of fiction with reality and will tend to give that person a falsified

view of that situation. Gilbert writes, “Imagination’s second shortcoming is its tendency

to project the present onto the future” (Gilbert 178). For example, if an alcoholic, after
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finishing a beer, tells himself/herself that they will stop drinking, how they feel then

influences how they think they are going to feel later. The third shortcoming of

imagination is, “… its failure to recognize that things will look different once they

happen—in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better” (Gilbert 178).

Therefore, using surrogates helps to clear those spots up where imagination would natural

fill in.

Most people have much more in common with other people than they think.

Gilbert wrote, “Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t

know you’re like most people. Science has give us a lot of facts about the average person,

and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t seem herself

as average” (Gilbert 181). Most people see themselves as different than other people and

more unique, but in reality, and as mentioned earlier, most of our knowledge comes from

observing and getting information from those other people. Thus, everyone becomes

more similar than we originally believed. “We recognize that our decisions are influenced

by social norms, but fail to recognize that that others’ decisions were similarly

influenced,” Gilbert writes on page 182.

Surrogates also help in making people realize that they do not know all on their

own and that more information floats around the world than one could ever come to

know in two, three, maybe four lifetimes. Hence, other people walk around spitting out

new information all the time for others to retain and spit out to others they know. Gilbert

mentions three things that explain why we seem to believe that we have something to us

than others. The first of those reads, “… even if we aren’t special, the way we know

ourselves is. We are the only people in the world whom we can know from the inside.
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We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must infer that other people are

experiencing theirs” (Gilbert 182). This simply means that we make ourselves special in

our minds, but in reality we need other people more than we will ever realize. The second

reason reads, “… that we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special. Most of us want to fit in

well with our peers, but we don’t want to fit in too well” (Gilbert 182). Everyone wants

that independence in their lives, but one can be only so independent before they start

needing other people there to help them out. It becomes hard sometimes to make difficult

life decisions without consulting someone who may have gone through the same sort of

situation. Gilbert’s third reason reads, “… why we tend to overestimate our uniqueness is

that we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness—that is, we tend to think of people

as more different from one another than they actually are” (Gilbert 183). Although

people have similarities as well as differences, similarities tend to overpower the number

of differences between people.

Daniel Gilbert’s thoughts on surrogates and super-replicators need to become

more widely known among people these days because it could help out tremendously. It

is not so much that people do not get help from other people, but more so that they do not

realize it. This makes it hard for them to understand that one’s friends or neighbors or

acquaintances closely resemble them in many ways. Also, that one learns so much from

everyday people. In order to follow Gilbert’s thoughts, one must not use imagination to

get a feel for how their future will look, but instead should base that prediction on other

people’s real-life problems, happiness, and experiences. This will not only maintain an

assuring feeling, but will also help in more confident and happy about the decision they

make. It helps to talk to someone else about problems one may be facing because it helps
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make one feel better about themself. It makes them feel as if they are not the only person

going through the certain situation, and in return, leaving them reassured. Surrogates aid

in keeping people happier because they allow people to learn from others’ mistakes.
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Works Cited

Gilbert, Daniel. "Reporting Live from Tomorrow." 2007. Emerging: Contemporary

Readings for Writers. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010. Print.