If someone wants to read just one book to learn about the complexities of life: what makes it go well, what brings meaning to it, how to make sense of conflicting advice and ideologies, I would easily recommend this book. Jonathan Haidt attempts to to provide a survey of several thousand years worth of advice (from religious and secular texts across the world) while integrating it into the best scientific knowledge the world currently possesses; I think he succeeds.

Haidt divides the multitude of questions into 11 chapters and ties them together with a metaphor he sees as most useful for understanding human beings: a rider on top of an elephant. The rider is our ‘reason’ while the elephant is our intertwined set of emotions. Though a rider can steer the elephant, it takes effort and sometimes it’s impossible to alter the elephant’s behavior much. For instance, this analogy is a good fit when we think about our new year’s resolutions (a common inability to break habits). Furthermore, the analogy yields to good advice about altering one’s behavior (and Haidt spells out how to do it).

Much like many good books about happiness, Haidt emphasizes what makes for a happy life (as well as describes the scientific findings and historical texts that support these conclusions when he can). Noise, commutes during traffic, lack of control are not things humans can get used to – these factors consistently drive down one’s happiness. Relationships (friends and romantic) are consistently shown to be one of the most important factors in one’s happiness.   (more…)

Perhaps one of the best books on happiness. While the author does not attempt to provide an overview of everything social scientists now know about happiness (what causes it and what diminishes it), he provides a coherent story about why we are so bad at forecasting our future happiness. Gilbert describes the numerous biases we have when dealing with the world and how they affect our perception of it. He gives a good overview of how psychologists are able to study happiness despite the numerous shortcomings people have when remembering and introspecting.

Gilbert gives three reasons humans are consistently bad at predicting how happy they will be in the future.

1. We have a “blind spot” in our minds – so fluently our brains fills in the missing details when we think of things, we do not notice how much is missing. Because of this general phenomenon, we are prone to make certain kinds of errors: we imagine the future outcomes with unfounded certainty about how they will be.
2. We often think our imagined future will be like our current state, often to our detriment. For instance, people who are stuffed with food will wrongly expect to not appreciate a tasty treat the following day.
3. We rationalize outcomes: bad events are not as bad as we imagine, and often good events turn out less enjoyable. Severely bad events like becoming paraplegic turn out to not be as detrimental to happiness as people think. When imagining a life without control of your legs, you will concentrate on all the things you will not be able to do, forgetting that numerous of life’s pleasures will still be there. When choosing a vacation spot, you often imagine all the things that will go right, while forgetting the annoyances you will run into: mosquitoes, bad weather, moody people.

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Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived is a collection of 13 articles written specifically on the topic, published in 2003. This book is meant to be read by scholars or readers interested in more scholarly writing. Each chapter is written in a style of a journal article and is followed up with numerous references. The chapters deal with the relationship between flourishing and many aspects of life: relationships, work, leisure, volunteering, morality, creativity, genius, wisdom. Each chapter will introduce the reader to the terminology, frame the importance of the problem, review the extant literature, synthesize the material, and propose further direction for research.

Despite  its technical nature, the contents of this book are very accessible, and contain very useful suggestions or at least hints about achieving flourishing. A curious reader will have plenty of references to follow up on in any direction she chooses. A particularly useful chapter on relationships has a thorough discussion concerning factors that improve or worsen relationships and points out the limitations of current research.