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I just finished Daniel Gilbert’s new book, and it’s highly recommended. Next time in Cambridge, I’ll be asking him to join me at Grafton Street for a Guinness (you’ll get this if you read the book).

He uses one of the most humorous and accessible non-fiction, science-related writing styles to explain a whole genre of psychological, psychiatric, and philosophical research. His basic message is that we are crap at remembering our past happiness, and also terrible at making decisions that would increase our future happiness. His advice �� trust the testimony of others when deciding what choices to make.

Here are some choice bits from the book, but again �� I recommend you take the time to enjoy it for yourself!

“[When we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up] they generally come up with things like “the candy guy�� or “a tree climber.�� We chuckle because the odds that the child will ever become the candy guy or a tree climber are vanishingly small…But notice that while these are the wrong answers to our question, they are the right answers to another question, namely, “What do you want to be now?”…At some point between our high chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about later.��

“When we think of events in the distant past or distant future we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen.��

“The point here is that we generally do not sit down with a sheet of paper and start logically listing te pros and cons of the future events we are contemplating, but rather, we contemplate them by simulating those events in our imaginations and then noting our emotional reactions to that simulation. Just as imagination previews objects, so does it prefeel events.��

“Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition…Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage…One way to beat habituation is to increase the variety of one’s experiences. Another way…is to increase the amount of time that separates repetitions of the experience.��

“As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience…our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.��

“Research shows that when people are given electric shocks, they actually feel less pain when they believe they are suffering for something of great value…If you’ve managed to forgive your spouse for some egregious transgression but still find yourself miffed about the dent in the garage door…then you have experienced this paradox.��

“Inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen.��

“Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case…Our relentless desire to explain everything that happens may well distinguish us from fruit flies, but it can also kill our buzz.��

“Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, [experience] does not always pay clear dividends.��

“In short, the production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth.��