Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness is a nonfiction book by Daniel Gilbert. It came out in 2006 in the United States and Canada. It is a bestseller in the New York Times. They also translated it into more than thirty languages.

Theme

Gilbert's main idea is that people are not good at imagining the future and what will make them happy. He says this happens because of how they see things and their thinking habits. According to him, there are three ways the imagination does not work well:

1. When people picture things in their minds, they usually add or skip details, and they might not notice that important details could be wrong or missing in what they're thinking.
2. What people imagine for the future (or remember from the past) is often more like how things are right now than how they will actually be (or were).
3. The mind doesn't realize that things will feel different when they truly happen. For example, the psychological immune system can make negative things feel not as bad as they first thought.

Gilbert also talks about 'filling in,' which means the mind often uses patterns to connect events we remember with other events we think should be part of the expected experience. This 'filling in' is something our eyes and optic nerves do too, like when they replace the blind spot in our vision with what our mind thinks should be there.

The book is made for regular people, and it tries not to use complicated words. Instead, it explains everyday mistakes in thinking by using simple experiments that take advantage of those mistakes.