Anyway

Daniel Gilbert’s Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness is rightly pop­u­lar (I had to wait some time before it became avail­able at the local lib­rary). Des­pite the title, it’s not one of these “seven steps to real hap­pi­ness” books. It’s more a book that tells you why people’s expect­a­tions of what will or should make them happy are often mis­placed. Lots of inter­est­ing bits of inform­a­tion about how the mind works, and what it does and doesn’t do, which explained a lot to me. A couple of examples: why is it that when you take a photo of some­thing, and then try to remem­ber it, all you get is a men­tal image of the photo you took? Why is it that the end­ing of a movie has a lar­ger effect on what you think about the movie than a ran­dom piece in the middle? All fas­cin­at­ing stuff and well worth read­ing if you want to under­stand why people do some of the things they do and think the way they do.

Which is not to say I don’t have quibbles with the book, I do, but those are minor. And mostly in the last chapter, where I won­der whether some of the sur­veys he quotes would have had dif­fer­ent res­ults had they been car­ried out in other coun­tries or other cultures.

In all, I recom­mend read­ing this book if you’re at all inter­ested in what makes people tick. Whether you agree with all the points he makes or not, it cer­tainly will make you think about your own beha­viour, and give you explan­a­tions for oth­ers’ beha­viour that you may not have come up with otherwise.