Strange Symphonies The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Stumbling on Happiness ( Official Site, Wikipedia ) by Daniel Gilbert ( Wikipedia, TED, TED Talk - Why are we happy? )

pg 4

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.

pg 5

In fact, there's really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and the at achievement is conscious experience. Seeing the Great Pyramid or remembering the Golden Gate or imagining the Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building any one of them.

pg 6

Just as an abacus can put two and two together to produce four without having thoughts about arithmetic, so brains can add past to present to make future without ever thinking about any of them.

pg 6

Rather than saying that such brains are predicting, let's say that they are nexting.

pg 8

Our brains were made for nexting, and that's just what they'll do.

pg 17

The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.

pg 18

thinking about the future can be pleasurable

pg 18

merely imagining these possibilities is itself a source of joy.

pg 18

When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.

pg18

thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we'd rather think about it than get there.

pg18

Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit. Indeed, some events are more pleasurable to imagine than to experience.

pg19

when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur.

pg19

events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic

pg21

Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain, and this is one of the reasons why our brains stubbornly insist on churning out thoughts of the future.

pg 21

We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it.

pg 22

we look into the future so that we can make predictions about it, we make predictions about it so that we can control it

pg 22

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed. And occasionally dead.

pg 23

gaining control can have a positive impact on one's health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.

pg 24

"Why should we want to control our futures?" then the surprisingly right answer is that it feels good to do so - period.

pg 33

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.

pg 36

emotional happiness is an experience, it can only be approximately defined by its antecedents and by its relation to other experiences

pg 36

People want to be happy, and all other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.

pg 36

Psychologists have traditionally made striving toward happiness the centerpeice of their theories of human behavior because they have found that if they don't, their theories don't work so well.

pg 37

This endeavor (of happiness) has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.

pg 37

many people consider the desire for happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement: something we all have, but not something of which we should be especially proud. The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base - a vacuous state of "bovine contentment". that cannot possibly be the basis of a meaningful human life.

pg 38

If you considered it perfectly tragic for life to be aimed at nothing more substantive and significant than a feeling and yet you could not help but notice that people spend their days seeking happiness, then what might you be tempted to conclude? Bingo! You might be tempted to conclude that the word happiness does not indicate a good feeling but rather that it indicates a very special good feeling that can only be produced by a very special means. ... In fact, the Greekish had a word for this kind of happiness - eudaimonia - which translates literally as "good spirit" but which probably means something like "human flourishing" or "life well lived"

pg 39

The ancient Athenian legislator Solon suggested that one could not say that a person was happy until the person's life had ended because happiness is the result of living up to one's potential - and how can we make such a judgment until we see how the whole thing turns out?

pg 39

Christian theologians added a nifty twist to this classical conception: Happinses was not merely the product of a life of virtue but the reward for a life of virtue, and that reward was not necessarily to be expected in this lifetime.

pg 148

"So how do we decide how we will feel about things that are going to happen in the future? The answer is that we tend to imagine how we would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing."

pg 153

"... human beings don't think in absolute dollars. They think in relative dollars, and fifty is or isn't a lot of dollars depending on what it is relative to"

pg 184

people tend to see what they want to see.

pg 209

In both cases, students chose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery - despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness.

pg 210

Our relentless desire to explain everything that happens may well distinguish us from fruit flies, but it can also kill our buzz.

pg 210

The eye and the brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness. Because we do not realize that we have generated a positive view of our current experience, we do no realize that we will do so again in the future.