Interesting book. It's not a self-help kind of thing, at least it's not intended to be. It's a rational, thought out expose on what happiness actually is and what causes it from a lecturing psychologist. Dan Gilbert is a genuinely funny and smart guy and backs up his thoughts with numerous studies and data. Some conclusions:
- We can predict future events but not future emotional states (our current one gets in the way)
- The best predictor of future happiness is not with ourselves at all -- it's by asking someone that is doing what you think may make you happy. We're not as different as we may like to think.
- Small misfortunes hurt more than big ones. We have an "emotional immune system" that kicks in for big upsets like death and divorce that works by rationalizing the events so they're not really our fault or they are for the best. However this immune system doesn't get triggered with smaller ones like losing $20, because we still need to learn from our mistakes.
- We are limited by the constraints of our imaginations. Quite literally, if we can't imagine it, we can't do it.
- We almost always exaggerate in imagining the long- term happiness something we want to happen will give us.
- Many of the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world. We imagine they are happy, but they aren't. Contrastingly, many of those we imagine to be unhappy (such as handicapped people) actually are very happy.
- Happiness is rarely as good as we imagine it to be, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will. The same mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness.
http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/1400077427/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6232659-5188943?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174572888&sr=8-1
