"Stumbling on Happiness"

Manisha and I have been both reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It's a very well-written and funny book that goes into the gory details of how the human imagination systematically creates distortions due to these three shortcomings:

• Realism: its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us
• Presentism - projects the present onto the future
• Rationalization - its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen (in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better)

The bottom line of the book: we are really bad at predicting our future mental states, including what will make us happy. If you want to know if a move to Florida will make you happy, the absolute best way to know is to ask somebody who is in Florida right now! (& no, none of us is so different from the rest of humanity that a random human being's current experience is not applicable to us.) The book is really saying to me that practically most external changes to my life will not increase my happiness in a lasting way. It will keep reverting back to my base level of happiness.

So what does matter in terms of our happiness? Manisha and I had a most illuminating couple minutes of discussion about this the other night. The way we see it, the car is a box that takes us places, the house is a box we live in and we have lived in enough variety of towns to realize that most places grow on you once you start living there. What is left? What's left is the activities we do and the people we do them with. Everything else is a setting for that. That's basically the segue for Camelot cohousing. We want to live in Camelot for the people and the activities we will do with their involvement (direct and indirect). And as cold-hearted and calculating as it may sound, it's not the actual flesh-and-blood people, but the type of people. After all there is bound to be some movement of people in and out of Camelot (and in and out of the rest of our circles). But our happiness will keep increasing as long as we have our activities that engage us and grow us and the people who feed them.

Having proven rather conclusively that most of the generic advice to become happier (get more money, move to Florida) does not work, now Gilbert has endorsed "The How of Happiness" by Sonja Lyubomirsky. This book seems to be backed by hard science. That's the next book on my reading list.