Stumbling on Happiness

This is my second reading. Again, I found the book informative and well written. Again, I felt disappointed by Gilbert's failure to differentiate between kinds of happiness.

Gilbert is a terrific writer: engaging, entertaining, even laugh-out-loud funny at times. The book is well organized, rich with examples of the latest knowledge in psychology, neuroscience, and economics (but don't worry – he makes it readable without dumbing it down). Without actually labeling them as such, he describes many of our cognitive biases: the tricks our brains play on us, how and why they happen, and why they're so hard for us to see.

The conclusion of the book is simple: if you want to know how happy or unhappy something will make you, don't trust your imagination. Instead, look to and trust the experiences of others who have been there. Getting to that conclusion, convincing the reader of it, really does take the entire book, and it's worth it. I'm disappointed at his lack of discussion of internal vs external rewards, of deep fulfilling happiness vs the shallow potato-chip-yum kind ... but that's another book. Despite that lack, I fervently recommend this book to anyone who wants to know and understand a little bit about ourselves.