Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. 

4/5 rating.

Book #146 of 2019. Read December 25, 2019.

This was a very interesting, light-hearted, yet informative, psychology book.

Daniel lays out many of the ways that our brains are really pretty bad at remembering, explaining our current feelings, and properly imagining both the positive and negative aspects of the future.

His overview of our shortcomings is comical, and provides some useful insight into our minds. As Daniel notes: “Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, fair-minded, and healthy – not to mention more attractive – than the average person.” While we may not properly analyze our lives, these quirks or our brains are here to stay, so you might as well sit down and read about them!

Quotes:

“Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it’s a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.

Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice.”

“Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur. Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures.”

“Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?” – Alexander Pope

“Those subatomic particles that like to be everywhere at once seem to cancel our one another’s behavior so that the large conglomeration of particles that we call cows, cars, and French Canadians stay exactly where we put them.”

“As one research team concluded, ‘Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, fair-minded, and healthy – not to mention more attractive – than the average person.’”

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