Book Review: Stumbling On Happiness

Posted on 23 October 2007

If you chose to only read one book this year, I strongly urge you to consider this one. It ranks at the very top of a small collection of books that have fundamentally changed the way I think. Daniel Gilbert is not only brilliant, his writing style is irrepressibly humorous, charming and entirely accessible. Stumbling on Happiness, which won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books, is a joy to read and will change the way you look at just about, well, everything.

Stumbling on Happiness is based on a very simple but powerful concept - that what makes human beings unique is our ability to think about the future. Gilbert draws on the latest scientific studies from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to provide answers to some of the most profound mysteries of how the human mind really works. In these pages, you’ll learn, among other things, the science of how our experiences of the here and now color our memories of the past and imagination of the future, why our innate drive to predict and control how we will feel a day or a month or a year from now today often leaves us ill-prepared when the future finally comes, and, most of all, how happiness itself is elusive. I’d be lying if I told you that the lessons in this book didn’t haunt me on a daily basis in both times of joy and stress. Gilbert argues his points expertly. Trust me, you owe it to your yourself to read this book. Gilbert himself admits this point - “No one can say how you will feel when you get to the end of this book…but if your future self is not satisfied when it arrives at the last page, it will at least understand why you mistakenly thought it would be.”

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