Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Stumbling on Happiness had a lot of really excellent information in it. It’s not a how-to guide for happiness, so don’t buy it expecting that. What it is is an examination of the ways in which we try, and fail, to predict what will make us happy and the reasons why we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy. In some ways it reminded me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my favorite books, which makes the point that we can’t possibly ever make a good decision because we don’t know what the results will be. And that even though we look back on past decisions as a guide, that’s no use because a) we only know how the path we chose went. We don’t know if the other path would have been better or worse. And b) every situation is unique anyway. That’s what the “unbearable lightness of being” is – that we can’t stand the fact that all the pondering we do is pointless. That we could just “be” and do as well as we do with all that thinking.
Anyway, Stumbling on Happiness is sort of saying the same thing but with clinical research and examples. It was an interesting read, if not perhaps practically useful. My only objection to the book was that the tone was so cutesy and light-hearted that it got a little cloying. The author is obviously trying to make clinical material fun and accessible but he goes farther than he needs to. The material speaks for itself.