Stumbling on Happiness

Recently, I've been reading a few blogs that focus on personal finance. I really enjoy Get Rich Slowly and FiveCentNickel. One of these sites (or both, I can't entirely remember) recommended the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

I've been thinking a lot these days about happiness. Generally speaking, I'm happy. I like my life and feel in control of it. But within the past six months, there have been a lot of changes in my life such as my recent engagement to Chris & his move to Phoenix to live with me. Currently, I am very, very happy (if I knew living with Chris would be so good, I would have done it a year ago!), but that doesn't mean I didn't worry about it tremendously before it happened. And as is my nature, I've been worrying plenty about the future. Will marriage make Chris and I more or less happy? How about kids?

I haven't read much about happiness despite thinking about it a lot. So I went to the library and picked up the book. (Actually, I requested it via their website and it was put on hold at the library closest to me so I could pick it up. How convenient!) The author looks at happiness from a scientific perspective. He sites study after study to back up his points. For me, this book was great. I learned a lot about humans and how our brains work. It opened my eyes to happiness and is helping me worry a lot less about the future.

Here's a summary of the key points from my perspective:

• We rely on our imagination to determine if we'll be happy in the future. We "imagine" the future situation. But our imaginations are bad! They only fill in part of a story and can never provide all the details of a situation.
• Our memories are bad! We only remember small pieces of our experiences (like a snapshot) and our imagination fills in the rest. We are bad at predicting the future because we are bad at remembering the past. Our memories just aren't accurate.
• The best way to know if you'll be happy in a particular situation is to ask someone else about their experience of that situation. Don't rely on your own imagination!
• Money doesn't lead to happiness. Once you get your basic needs met, there's little improvement in general happiness. The specific study showed little difference between people who made $100K a year and people who made $5M a year.
• Society perpetuates ideas about happiness in order to perpetuate itself. For example, society says money will make you happy in order to keep the economy going. It says having children make you happy too. Imagine what would happen if people stopped having children! The book showed four studies that showed happiness diminished with the introduction of kids to a family.
• Humans are really good at rationalizing really bad situations. We have a tendency to make the best of all situations so generally, we're happier than we imagine we would be. For example, we see the loss of a job as the opportunity to begin a new career.

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