Stumbling on Happiness notes

• 1. Try to allow of for changes over time: mood, information, experience

  2. Don’t be surprised if later is not what you expected

  3. Taking a somewhat distant view of yourself, as though you were a person you knew as a friend or colleague, can be a big help

  4. We all have biases, built-in ones and learned ones. We can change them in some ways but our tastes and interests are somewhat individual and not facts permanent standing.

  5. We literally cannot remember everything that happens to us. We only remember highlights and they get edited afterwards sometimes.

YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: Stumbling on Happiness

18 Highlights | 2 Notes

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 116

This is when I learned that mistakes are interesting and began planning a life that contained several of them. But an optical illusion is not interesting simply because it causes everyone to make a mistake; rather, it is interesting because it causes everyone to make the same mistake.

Daniel Gilbert says you dont know your future self

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 23

People will wager more money on dice that have not yet been tossed than on dice that have already been tossed but whose outcome is not yet known,

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Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 39

Happiness is a word that we generally use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it. Does it make any sense to say, “After a day spent killing his parents, Frank was happy”? Indeed it does. We hope there never was such a person, but the sentence is grammatical, well formed, and easily understood. Frank is a sick puppy, but if he says he is happy and he looks happy, is there a principled reason to doubt him?

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 41

For instance, when our spouse excitedly reveals that she has just been asked to spend six months at the company’s new branch in Tahiti while we stay home and mind the kids, we may say, “I’m not happy, of course, but I’m happy that you’re happy.” Sentences such as these make high school English teachers apoplectic, but they are actually quite sensible if we can just resist the temptation to take every instance of the word happy as an instance of emotional happiness. Indeed, the first time we utter the word, we are letting our spouse know that we are most certainly not having the you-know-what-I-mean feeling (emotional happiness), and the second time we utter the word we are indicating that we approve of the fact that our spouse is (judgmental happiness). When we say we are happy about or happy that, we are merely noting that something is a potential source of pleasurable feeling, or a past source of pleasurable feeling, or that we realize it ought to be a source of pleasurable feeling but that it sure doesn’t feel that way at the moment. We are not actually claiming to be experiencing the feeling or anything like it. It would be more appropriate for us to tell our spouse, “I am not happy, but I understand you are, and I can even imagine that were I going to Tahiti and were you remaining home with these juvenile delinquents, I’d be experiencing happiness rather than admiring yours.” Of course, speaking like this requires that we forsake all possibility of human companionship, so we opt for the common shorthand and say we are happy about things even when we are feeling thoroughly distraught. That’s fine, just as long as we keep in mind that we don’t always mean what we say.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 44

Experiences of chardonnays, string quartets, altruistic deeds, and banana-cream pie are rich, complex, multidimensional, and impalpable. One of the functions of language is to help us palp them—to help us extract and remember the important features of our experiences so that we can analyze and communicate them later.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 45

Every act of memory would require precisely the amount of time that the event being remembered had originally taken, which would permanently sideline us the first time someone asked if we liked growing up in Chicago.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 48

Magicians have known all this for centuries, of course, and have traditionally used their knowledge to spare the rest of us the undue burden of money.

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The distinction between experience and awareness is elusive because most of the time they hang together so nicely.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 87

But it wasn’t, and that fact can be easily demonstrated. For example, volunteers in one study were shown a series of slides depicting a red car as it cruises toward a yield sign, turns right, and then knocks over a pedestrian.

5 After seeing the slides, some of the volunteers (the no-question group) were not asked any questions, and the remaining volunteers (the question group) were. The question these volunteers were asked was this: “Did another car pass the red car while it was stopped at the stop sign?” Next, all the volunteers were shown two pictures—one in which the red car was approaching a yield sign and one in which the red car was approaching a stop sign—and were asked to point to the picture they had actually seen. Now, if the volunteers had stored their experience in memory, then they should have pointed to the picture of the car approaching the yield sign, and indeed, more than 90 percent of the volunteers in the no-question group did just that. But 80 percent of the volunteers in the question group pointed to the picture of the car approaching a stop sign. Clearly, the question changed the volunteers’ memories of their earlier experience, which is precisely what one would expect if their brains were reweaving their experiences—and precisely what one would not expect if their brains were retrieving their experiences. This general finding—that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event—has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things.6 First, the act of remembering involves “filling in” details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.7 Indeed, this phenomenon is so powerful that it happens even when we know someone is trying to trick us.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 88

Bed Rest Awake Tired Dream Wake Snooze Blanket Doze Slumber Snore Nap Peace Yawn Drowsy Here’s the trick. Which of the following words was not on the list? Bed, doze, sleep, or gasoline? The right answer is gasoline, of course. But the other right answer is sleep, and if you don’t believe me, then you should lift your hand from the page. (Actually, you should lift your hand from the page in any case, as we really need to move along). If you’re like most people, you knew gasoline was not on the list, but you mistakenly remembered reading the word sleep.8 Because all the words on the list are so closely related, your brain stored the gist of what you read (“a bunch of words about sleeping”) rather than storing every one of the words. Normally this would be a clever and economical strategy for remembering. The gist would serve as an instruction that enabled your brain to reweave the tapestry of your experience and allow you to “remember” reading the words you saw. But in this case, your brain was tricked by the fact that the gist word—the key word, the essential word—was not actually on the list. When your brain rewove the tapestry of your experience, it mistakenly included a word that was implied by the gist but that had not actually appeared, just as volunteers in the previous study mistakenly included a stop sign that was implied by the question they had been asked but that had not actually appeared in the slides they saw. This experiment has been done dozens of times with dozens of different word lists, and these studies have revealed two surprising findings. First, people do not vaguely recall seeing the gist word and they do not simply guess that they saw the gist word. Rather, they vividly remember seeing it and they feel completely confident that it appeared.9 Second, this phenomenon happens even when people are warned about it beforehand.10 Knowing that a researcher is trying to trick you into falsely recalling the appearance of a gist word does not stop that false recollection from happening.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 219

What is true of elephants and words is also true of experiences.3 Most of us can bring to mind memories of riding a bicycle more easily than we can bring to mind memories of riding a yak, hence we correctly conclude that we’ve ridden more bikes than yaks in the past.

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Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moments, and theories about how we must have felt way back then, all of which gravely compromise our ability to learn from our own experience.

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As Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote in 1776: “The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 240

If no one wants to be rich, then we have a significant economic problem, because flourishing economies require that people continually procure and consume one another’s goods and services.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 257

But the agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions changed all that, and the resulting explosion of personal liberty has created a bewildering array of options, alternatives, choices, and decisions that our ancestors never faced. For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.