Manfromearth Stumbling on Happiness

Do You Know What Makes You Happy? Do You Really?

Review

Do you know what makes you happy? More money, better job, bigger house, may be a private jet to travel the world in!
Daniel Gilbert asserts that we can’t actually know what will make us happy. We are not wired to prospectively know that. There is a bug in our cognitive processing mechanism when it comes to predicting what will make us happy.
He states that we are almost always wrong in predicting what makes us happy, the things that make us happy we don’t want, and the things we want won’t make us happy.
Gilbert states that happiness is a subjective emotional state, he gives a vary good example; he says that most people would think that being a conjoined twin is horrible, you can’t possibly be happy. Then why conjoined twins rate themselves as happy as nonconjoined people.
Well, you might say; I don’t know about conjoined twins, but I know what makes me happy, right? Wrong, Gilbert will tell you, for the same reason that you can’t imagine how happy you will be as a conjoined twin.
The problem is we can’t project ourselves accurately into the future. I totally agree, judging by my personal experience.
Many years ago, I remember seeing this beautiful woman, I was saying to myself: o man, if she only agrees to go out on a date with me that will make me really happy; to my surprise she did. The date was going great, we had great time, but I kept saying to myself: if only she would agree to go out with me again, that will make me very happy? She did.
And here I am going out with a woman that I was dreaming about; I couldn’t believe how my luck. Years later, and two children later, I started to get restless and I stated to behave like an ass, needles to say we separated, and I thought; great I want to be by myself, I am happy.
Now, I feel miserable, and I keep saying to myself: “ what the f*** was I thinking”. I wish I read Gilbert’s book sooner.
He writes: "When we have an experience . . . on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time," he writes. "Psychologists calls this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage."
Great book, read it, it might help you in not making the same stupid mistakes I made.

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