If you've ever spent a sleepless night wondering if you're going to have a happy life, look no further. Harvard College Professor of Psychology Daniel Gilbert would like to tell you that happiness isn't something you can ever concretely achieve, and it's not just because you haven't found the right self-help book. There are fundamental qualities to the way human brains are wired that prevent us from predicting what will make us happy. Trying harder isn't going to get us there because we're simply chasing the wrong things. Now, though you may think that this flagrantly pessimistic thesis is a strange way for Gilbert to make a case for why you should read his book, it should at least stoke your curiosity. If Gilbert does not profess to hold the golden key to the gate of happiness, he can at least explain why everyone (including you) eventually fails to achieve the ultimate state of bliss that they spend their lives dreaming of and working toward.

The author begins with what he calls "The Sentence." You know—the one that begins with " The human being is the only animal that..." and ends with who knows what, depending on the state of mind of its writer. In Gilbert's case, "The Sentence" takes the following form: " The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." Our ability to think about past or future is especially poor when it comes to dealing with something as conceptually amorphous as happiness. No one can maintain a state of ecstasy on a permanent basis, so what do people mean when they say they want to be happy? Though Gilbert is aware of the importance of this question, he does not offer an exact answer, as one doesn't exist. He likens the experience of happiness to the experience of seeing yellow: to a color-blind person it's simply not describable, but for the rest of us, there's no need to explain. Unfortunately, even for the content among us, memories and predictions of happiness are filtered through something like a black and white lens. Thus, our pursuit of happiness is doomed to the same result as a color-blind person's quest for yellow; we're bound go about them in the wrong way. Gilbert argues that the black and white lens which makes us so foolish is the very same faculty that, according to "The Sentence," humanizes us: our imagination.

Gilbert postulates that there are three things wrong with our ability to imagine. The first, ironically, is that we're too good at it. Imagination is so meticulous when filling in the gaps of memories and predictions that we never even notice what it's doing. This is the bogey of 'realism', or "the belief that things are in reality what they appear to be in the mind." In one of the analogies that makes the book so delightfully accessible, Gilbert likens realism to the way our brain automatically fills in the blind spot in our vision where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Gilbert argues that not only do we always imagine the future more optimistically than facts would warrant, we also tend to believe in our fantasies rather than succumb to the dullness of reality. Realism applies to everything from dessert to a greatly desired romantic partner; the more we imagine, the more likely we are to be disappointed. And the human brain is always imagining.

The next pitfall of imagination that Gilbert presents is 'presentism', or "the tendency for current experience to influence one's views of the past and the future." In other words, memories of past emotions and predictions of future emotions are heavily affected by present emotional states. As with realism, Gilbert offers findings from numerous psychology studies to support this claim, interspersed with anecdotes. One study he mentions found that people's reported life happiness had a direct correlation to good weather on the day they were surveyed. Evidently, their mood at the time of the survey significantly influenced their assessment of general happiness. This kind of presentism makes it very difficult for us to make objective predictions about what we'll want in the future because we're so influenced by the now. Anyone who's gone grocery shopping on a particularly full or empty stomach knows this.

The last mistake of imagination is rationalization, "the act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable." The fascinating thing about rationalization is that it only kicks in when we've really been hurt, offended, or otherwise beaten by the vicissitudes of life. This is why people who haven't been maimed, paralyzed, or struck with cancer always predict that they'll be far more unhappy than people who have actually been afflicted. Victors and victims alike who experience life-changing events will eventually return to their former levels of happiness.

Having examined the aspects of our psychology that prevent us from being happy, Gilbert turns to the question of what will make us happy. The conclusions he draws here are much less satisfying than his more negative arguments. They can be summed up in the following sentence: "If you believe (as I do) that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel." This is quite a sensible suggestion for how to predict whether we'll enjoy potato chips tomorrow when we've already stuffed ourselves on pretzels today, but it seems overly simplistic for the big things in life. You can't go and ask somebody else if you should marry "that guy." There isn't anyone who is currently having the experience of being married to him (hopefully). Gilbert's solution may work for the minor decisions studied by psychologists in labs, but it is impracticable and trivial as a guide to happiness. Gilbert doesn't really expect us to accept this narrow solution for our own use. He notes repeatedly that his readers will likely reject it, though he doesn't admit that our reason for doing so is the uselessness of the model outside of academia.

To derive a slightly more meaningful idea of Gilbert's views on happiness, we are required to look at the book as a whole and consider what we can conclude about the things that don't make us happy. He argues that the control-the-future approach to happiness will never work because our imaginations make us such poor judges of what will please us in the future. This resonates well with other research, which claims that happiness in life has more to do with mental habits than actual achievements. We all know consumerism is not the path to happiness, but many people pursue it anyway because they think they will be the exception. Gilbert seems to be suggesting that control-oriented thinking about the future is the same way, except that most of us don't realize how useless it is because we aren't aware of how poorly our present and future selves correlate. After an entire book devoted to proving this chronological discontinuity, Gilbert at last leaves us at last to draw our own conclusions about how best to adjust, as we continue to stumble on our own happiness.

 

Jenny Jin is a chemistry concentrator in Lowell House who hopes to have a wonderfully happy and fulfilling life someday