Contrary to what the title may suggest, this book is not about happiness or how to be happy. Daniel Gilbert is a psychology professor who explains how we fail to predict how we will feel in the future, both for things we choose, like where to live, whom to marry or what profession to pursue, and things that may happen to us, both good and bad.
An example is the idea that children bring happiness. Most people predict that they will be happier when they have kids, but research shows that couples' happiness decreases when they have children, and only increases back to previous levels when children move out of their parents home. This seems to be mostly true, and a well replicated finding, but like most examples in the book, it is not difficult to find exceptions.
[Just an aside. Parents have unrealistic expectations about their own performance as parents and about their offspring. Simply lowering expectations makes the experience of having children a lot more enjoyable. This is one argument of Bryan Caplan in his book "Selfish reasons to have more kids: why being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think". He is right.]
The author advises not to try to predict how we will feel in the future, but rather to ask other people who are experiencing what we are considering as an alternative for our future. For example, ask an accountant if he is happy in his job, before deciding to pursue accountancy as a profession. I understand the idea, but Gilbert fails to take into consideration people's variability. Some people enjoy working in occupations that others would hate, and vice versa. The author should have acknowledged this, and should have described better under which conditions asking another person is a good idea, and which factors make it more likely that the other person is experiencing the same feelings that you would experience if you were in his place. On the other hand, people overestimate how different they are from others. For many things, asking others seems a good strategy.
One of the reasons why we are wrong when we try to predict how we are going to feel is that when we imagine our future selves, we do so very schematically, just a few vignettes, and we tend to focus on very concrete aspects that we are considering in the moment. A solution for that, rather than asking someone else how they feel, is to do what psychologists call unpacking. Like in the Coffee Beans Procedure. Unpacking means explicitly fleshing out the details that cannot be included in our imagination all at once. This allows for a broader and more realistic perspective. I've seen the term "unpacking" in a recent weblog post, which in turn references a paper from 2010. Maybe the concept was not so well known in 2006, when the book was written.
I liked the book. It is entertaining and explains some interesting research, such as the many ways in which our memories deceive us. The book also shows that the idea of asking someone else in order to predict how we would feel has empirical support.
Last updated: 2025-12-11