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.

Worse yet, we persist in making the same mistakes we made previously – oblivious to lessons of the past or the wisdom of others. Gilbert suggests a simple remedy that he admits you are unlikely to use: instead of using the faulty faculty of your imagination, ask someone who is in the situation you plan to be in. While we tend to think ourselves to be unique, we are far more like others than we imagine. This means if a stranger feels lousy having come into some circumstance you imagine to be wonderful, you may do better believing the stranger than your imagination.

This surely is not the only lesson to be drawn from the book: most of the studies Gilbert summarizes shed light on what one can do to avoid faulty affective forecasting. While not a self-help book, the contents of this book are far more valuable to someone who wants to live a happier life than most books on the market.

Gilbert is a pedantic scholar, he supports most of his claims with academic research articles: 35 pages of them! Despite the academic rigor, this book has much humor and the scientific findings are presented so naturally, reading should be a breeze.

Watch Dan Gilbert give a 20-minute talk titled “Why are we happy?” or a 30-minute talk about mistaken expectations, both of which include some of the content from this book.