Stumbling on happiness by Daniel Todd Gilbert
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Imagination
Imagination has three shortcomings, and if you didn’t know that then you may be reading this book backward. If you did know that, then you also know that:
Imagination’s frst shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us (which we explored in the section on realism). No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important.
Imagination’s second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future (which we explored in the section on presentism). When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by flling in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present.
Imagination’s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen-in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better (which we explored in the section on rationalization). When we imagine losing a job, for instance, we imagine the painful experience (“The boss will march into my offce, shut the door behind him …“) without also imagining how our psychological immune systems will transform its meaning (“I’ll come to realize that this was an opportunity to quit retail sales and follow my true calling as a sculptor“).
You cannot be anything you want to be - but you can be a lot more of who you already are.
/Strengths finder/
Definition of Hapiness
There are thousands of books on happiness, and most of them start by asking what happiness really is. As readers quickly learn, this is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the frst available tar pit, because happiness really is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please.
The problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fne scholarly careers have been based. If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the word ought to be used to indicate this or that, rather than scientifc or philosophical disagreements about the nature of this and that.
What are the this and the that that happiness most ofen refers to? The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Emotional happiness
Emotional happiness is the most basic of the trio-so basic, in fact, that we become tongue-tied when we try to defne it, as though some bratty child had just challenged us to say what the word the means and in the process made a truly compelling case for corporal punishment. Emotional happiness is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state, and thus it has no objective referent in the physical world. … [Emotional] happiness is the you-know-what-I-mean feeling.
Judgmental happiness
when a person says, “All in all, I’m happy about the way my life has gone,” psychologists are generally willing to grant that the person is happy. The problem is that people sometimes use the word happy to express their beliefs about the merits of things, such as when they say, “I’m happy they caught the little bastard who broke my windshield,” and they say things like this even when they are not feeling anything vaguely resembling pleasure. How do we know when a person is expressing a point of view rather than making a claim about her subjective experience? When the word happy is followed by the words that or about, speakers are usually trying to tell us that we ought to take the word happy as an indication not of their feelings but rather of their stances…
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. … [So we] 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.
Moral happiness
the word happiness does not indicate a good feeling but rather that it indicates a very special good feeling that can only be produced by very special means-for example, by living one’s life in a proper, moral, meaningful, deep, rich, Socratic, and non-piglike way. … The Greeks had a word for this kind of happiness-eudaimonia-which translates literally as “ good spirit” but which probably means something more like “ human flourishing” or “life well lived.”