 Daniel Gilbert's new book Stumbling on Happiness
is a great summer read -- you can polish it off in an afternoon or two
and it will make you think about -- and question -- what you want to do
with the rest of your life.
The book is about why the future
we imagine, plan for and work towards ends up so often being both very
different from and less satisfying than we expected. This is due in
part to not knowing ourselves, and how we are changing, and not knowing
what makes us happy and will make us happy:
Some
people...tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your
life as though it were your last, which only goes to show some people
would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb
advice...We treat our future selves as though they were our children,
spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows
that we hope will make them happy...Why [then] do they [our future
selves] experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather
than pride and appreciation...when we gave them the best years of our
lives?...Shouldn't we know the tastes, preferences, needs and desires
of the people we will be next year?
Gilbert explains why
we have the propensity to imagine the future (such thoughts take up
about 12% of all out thinking). "Why can't we just be here now?",
he asks. His answer: "Thinking about the future can be so pleasurable
that sometimes we'd rather think about it than get there". It has
practical value, too. Anticipation can mitigate the impact of
unpleasant events, and imagining them can motivate us to try to avoid
them. We have an innate desire to control our futures, and become
unhappy and hopeless when we feel we have lost that ability. But we are
terrible at imagining our future, and the happiness it will (or won't) bring us, because of what Gilbert calls illusions of foresight.
Most of the book is devoted to describing these illusions, which fall into three categories:
- The illusions of realism:
"Imagination works so quickly, quietly and effectively that we are
insufficiently skeptical of its products." We idealize the future. We
conjure up perfect stereotypes of behaviours and events. We omit
details of the future in our future imaginings that will powerfully
affect how we will feel. We fail to imagine what won't
happen. We make compound errors both of 'filling in' and 'leaving out'
in our imagined vision of our future selves and future lives. As a
result, what we plan and strive for is unreal, a complete fiction. And
when we get there, we are bound to be disappointed.
- The illusions of presentism:
"Imagination's products are...well, not particularly imaginative, which
is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual
present". We tend to project the future, and not anticipate or allow
for discontinuities.
We are rooted in the present, and can't imagine things (like a
post-civilization world without oil) that are very different from the
way they are now. And what we love (or loathe) now can diminish through
habituation. The future will not be a projection of the present "only
more so", so our plans based on imagining such a future are bound to be
inappropriate, even useless.
- The illusions of rationalization:
"Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the
future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events,
then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when
they happen". The 'future you' will be different from the 'present
you', and the job, or love, you dreamed about will likely turn out not
to be what the 'future you' really wants at all. We are much more
resilient than we think, and possess what Gilbert calls a
"psychological immune system" which "cooks the facts" (shades of
Lakoff) and provides us with comforting illusions about ourselves and
our situation. We see ourselves more positively than objectively, and
while we do most things subconsciously, we positively rationalize
'conscious' reasons for what we do, and don't do, in order to make
ourselves feel better, and more 'in control'. We regret inactions
more than actions. And illogically we view situations that we perceive
as inevitable more positively than very similar situations over which
we have some choice.
So what can we do about this? How can we 'see our future' and anticipate how we will feel about it more accurately?
Gilbert
examines and discards several alternatives, including practicing
imagining (just retrenches the illusions) and asking others for opinion
or coaching (they just reinforce the same myths that cloud our own
imaginations). Instead, he advocates finding 'surrogates' -- people who
are now in a situation similar to the one you think you might be in in
the future, and asking yourself if you would be happy if you'd done
what they did and were doing what they're doing. Less imagination, and
more research. This entails learning more about what the future will
probably be like when you get there, so that you have a richer context
for understanding what your life might be like, and then searching for
people who have already made a similar journey -- people whose present
is as much as possible like what your future, as objectively as you can
imagine, will be like. Then study them, and learn about your future
self. In other words, get real.
Gilbert
does an interesting job dissecting the argument that we're all unique,
and that no surrogate could possibly teach us about our future or how
happy we will be in it. Buy the book to read this, and just for the fun
of reading this 'anti-self-help book'.
In the afterword,
Gilbert suggests the ideas in this book have particular application in
making the three most important decisions about our future that we make
in our lives: Where to live, What to do, and Who to do it with. I suspect his next book will tackle these issues specifically. I hope it will tell us how to go about finding these 'surrogates'.
So now we have three
'finding people' challenges. Finding who to live with, and who to make
a living with, two subjects I've written a lot about on this blog. And
now, who to learn about the 'future you' from. Ideally, since the third
one has a substantial impact on the first two, we should probably start
with it. So much of what I'm learning these days keeps coming back to
finding models to learn from.
Time to go visit some intentional communities, and talk to some people there who are about ten years older and wiser than I am. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
