Curiously, one of the saddest
periods of my life occurred shortly after I finished my Ph.D. and started my
first tenure track faculty position. Graduate school had been fun but it was
beginning to wear a little thin: I was certainly tired of having my work judged
constantly by my professors, and I had been poor for far too long. Completion
of my degree and the start of a real job would surely solve all of this thereby
making me incredibly happy, and so I looked forward to my ‘new life’ with ardent
anticipation. Sadly, I was completely and horribly wrong. I could, I suppose,
have comforted myself by realizing that I was in good company. For example, though
he thought he would be terrifically happy when he ended his adolescence and
began work on the utilitarian projects for which he had been reared, John
Stuart Mill, who was far more famously sad than I could ever hope to be, was
just as wrong as I was. "All my happiness," he said in his Autobiography,
"was to be found in the continual pursuit of [achieving the social and
political ends set out by the radical utilitarians]. The end had ceased to
charm…  I seemed to have nothing left to live for."

John Stuart Mill and I are not
alone in our abysmal predictions of our future feelings. Daniel Gilbert’s
wonderfully written, provocative, and insightful Stumbling on Happiness explains
in great detail how and why we become such poor "affective forecasters,’
i.e., in layman’s terms, how and why so many of us come to be such terrible
judges regarding what will make us happy. Ironically, the culprit here is that
most human of faculties, our imagination, as Gilbert details in the three main
parts of his book dealing with what he calls "Realism," "Presentism,"
and "Rationalization."

In "Realism," Gilbert
argues that since no one can remember everything, we imagine only a few key
features of events and fill in or leave out the rest. Unfortunately, what we
leave out or fill in may be crucially important. For example, in the story I
related above about the beginning of my working life, I imagined only the
absence of professors’ assessments of me and my additional income. What my
imagination left out included that my colleagues and students would constantly
be assessing various aspects of my work, and that additional expenses would
more than make up for my additional income. Indeed, I would now look back with fondness
of my time in graduate school as truly happy days when time was ‘my own’ and I
had disposable income.

A second problem with imagination
is that it tends to project the present onto the future, a quality that Gilbert
calls presentism. So, for example, if I’m poor student at present, I will tend
to overestimate the value money will have for me in the future in the same way
that being overstuffed now from eating too much Thanksgiving dinner will make
me underestimate the value food will have for me tomorrow.

Finally, in "Rationalization,"
Gilbert explains the ways in which imagination tends to fail us by not
recognizing that things will look different once they happen. This is
especially true with respect to bad things happening: they rarely make us as
unhappy as we fear. So it is unlikely that not getting my job or failing my
oral defense would have been as devastating as I feared they would.

We would be much better off,
Gilbert argues, if we eschewed our imagination for predictions of our future
affective states and relied instead on the sage advice that could be offered by
the testimony of others who had experienced the things which we are
contemplating as future events. That is, "the best way to predict our
feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today" (228). Did
getting your academic job rid you of all your cares and woes? Was that
$32,000/year sufficient to make you happy?  Unfortunately, we tend to resist
this method for affective forecasting because, we think, it fails to recognize
our uniqueness: we believe that because we are truly different from others that
their experiences will be of little value to us. This is by and large false: we
are not nearly so distinct as we think (hence advertising really does work,
especially those advertisements that appeal to our view of ourselves as
incomparable and unique rebels), and as a result we tend to be mostly wrong
about what will make us happy in the future. Perhaps this is the (main) reason
why we have not become happier over the past fifty years despite the fact that,
in the affluent West, we have become better off on nearly every indicator of
social welfare.

            I loved Stumbling on Happiness.  Its
pages are absolutely full of fascinating studies regarding the way the human
mind works, for better or for worse.  It is also wonderfully free of jargon yet
Gilbert still manages to argue persuasively with academic rigor. He certainly
references a wealth of material from a wide variety of sources, both
theoretical and empirical, including much of his previous work in social
psychology and affective forecasting. As such, Stumbling on Happiness should
appeal to a wide audience ranging from relative novices to experts in the
field.

© 2006 Robert Scott Stewart

Robert Scott Stewart, Department of
Philosophy, Cape Breton University, Sydney, NS, Canada

Categories: Psychology, General