Stumbling on happiness

  This text is an exploration of why flaws in how our brains work prevents us from experiencing happiness. The author seems qualified. His illustrative examples are clear. His prose is clever, but sometimes it feels too clever. The smart-aleck metaphors and turns of phrase can get tiresome, but the quality of the advice pushes me to give it five stars. I listened to the audio version, which was read by the author, to good effect.

  Just as optical illusions can cause us to crash a car by miscalculating distance, emotional illusions may cause us to take actions we will regret later. Most of the book is occupied by Gilbert reviewing multiple ways in which the human mind cuts corners in order to do its job. The errors built into those short cuts can set us up for trouble. So we misremember the past, misperceive the present, and misimagine which course of action in the future will make us happy. 

  Early on in the book, Gilbert spends time making the case that subjective happiness in fact is the summum bonum, or highest good toward which we should strive. He then argues that the most valid way to study happiness is to ask people whether or not they are happy. You shouldn't even ask if they were happy in the past, because we misremember our past feelings. Variations in responses can be smoothed over by averaging responses from a large number of people.

  Another strange recursive aspect of the book is the relationship of the book itself to one of the major topics of the book, the brain's "psychological immune system" (let's call it the PIS). The PIS is an unconscious process within the brain to bias things in our favor. When bad things happen, the mind automatically starts trying to shift blame to someone else, if it can. But it only works if we are not aware of what is going on. If my conscious brain realizes that other parts of the brain are systematically biasing the way I look at things, the effect of the immune protection goes away. But here is Gilbert telling us about our PIS, which blows its cover by making it visible to conscious awareness. Doh!

  The PIS creates paradoxical outcomes for one's happiness. For example, only major events trigger it. So I will be more unhappy from little disappointments than from major disappointments. Spousal cheating triggers the bias defense, while spousal personal grooming habits do not. So the bigger jerk might be more well liked than the nicer but more annoying person. Crazy.

  The behavior of the PIS also has disturbing implications for human society. For example, it is triggered when the bad situation is inescapable. One could argue against legal divorce and other socially liberal policies using that result. Hey, if you have no choice, you will learn to accept your fate and be more satisfied. The paradox is that when we predict how we will feel in the future, we predict that we will be happy with more freedom and choice. But because of the PIS, we turn out not to be. Yikes. 

  One aspect of the human situation that Gilbert doesn't spend too much time on is that some human groups systematically exploit errors in thinking to take advantage of other humans. For example, credit card companies set the "minimum fee" at a level below the point necessary to  let the user get out of debt. So the consumer who pays what he believes he should will be forever trapped into paying high interest rates. So knowledge of the flaws in the human mental software can be dangerous in the hands of those who would use it to profit from the behavior of others. 

  However, Gilbert does see that certain cultural traditions about happiness can perpetuate themselves like a virus because they serve some purpose other than my personal happiness. (This is a weak version of the theory of memetics. The strong version of this theory is bogus, but the weak version isn't too bad.) So we celebrate child-rearing as fulfilling because otherwise we would die out, even though happiness levels drop when you are dealing with raising small children. Also, our economy might not thrive if we didn't promote the idea that consumption will make you happy. It doesn't have to be an organized conspiracy to trick us into foolish behavior, but in the example of the credit cards, it can be.

  Gilbert presents a method by which we can do a better job of predicting how happy we will be if we take a given course of action: find someone who has already done it and ask them if they are currently happy. However, he points out that on average, people do not like to follow this course of action. So we are fated to take the actions we imagine (often incorrectly) will make us happy, when in fact they don't, even though we could have gotten a better sense of future happiness just by asking someone with more experience. So we stumble in our quest, and we stumble on happiness.