Paradigm Shifted

I finished the book, Stumbling on Happiness. I came into it with one foot already in the choir, so maybe it’s not much of a feat that Gilbert convinced me to solidly plant both feet in his camp. He makes a compelling argument, using tools to which I’m susceptible – mostly statistics and really cool psych studies.

But he made some really interesting points, some of which I had mentioned in an earlier post. What’s interesting is that, despite so much evidence, we are in so much denial about how our brains work and what it takes to be happy. Part of that is a defense mechanism created by our brains – if we started to doubt ourselves at every turn, we’d lose that evolutionary drive to self-protect. But a lot of what he points out could go a long way towards easing some of our stress, if we were only ready to let go of preconceived notions. Some thoughts:

1. Our brains are tricking us. I discussed this before, but it’s true. We really only experience a fraction of what we are experiencing, and our brains fill in the result. It’s a survival mechanism, but one that has some faults in our more civilized life. For example, inattentional blindness often makes us unable to see things that are right in front of us.

2. We can’t know what it’s like not to know. Once you have insight into a situation, you are unable to know what it is like to not have that insight. Thus, you can’t say you’d rather have limbs than not have limbs, even if you’ve experienced both. We are, basically, prone to observer bias, or the idea that observing something changes it.

3. However you think you’ll feel in the future, you’re wrong. You cannot, with any high degree of accuracy, predict how you will feel about something in the future because you cannot remove the effect of your present experience. Thus, if you were full and someone asked you how happy you’d be eating ice cream tomorrow, you’d rank your happiness lower than someone who hadn’t eaten anything all day. But tomorrow, when both of you eat the ice cream, you’ll rank your happiness similarly in the moment. The present and future are hopelessly conflated, and that explains why so many people fail to accurately measure how happy they’d be doing (or not doing) something in the future.

4. Your memory is failing you. At the same time, you can’t separate the present from the past either. You think you remember a certain event just so, but actually, it didn’t really happen like that. How you feel in the present moment colors your remembrance, partly because your brain didn’t actually record that experience – just a summary of it. When you access that summary, your brain fills in the pieces in the moment.

5. There is a solution. And according to Gilbert, it’s really quite simple: just ask someone who is experiencing your future right now how they feel right now. That will give you an indication of what you’ll really think.

6. You aren’t as unique as you think. The previous solution won’t work because no one is just like you? Wrong. We’re all much more similar than we think we are, and other people’s experiences really are just like ours. Of course, people are clearly different than you might have a different experience, but you’d be surprised by how little it actually varies.

And the last ultimately, is why we can only stumble on happiness, instead of charting a clear path. We fail to use the appropriate tools, and seem hell-bent on relying on our own imperfect perceptions of what we think will be.