Why We're Bad at Predicting Our Own Joy: Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness"

Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is not, despite its title, a how-to guide for becoming happy. It is something more interesting: a witty, scientifically grounded investigation into why human beings are so remarkably bad at predicting what will make them happy. Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, draws on a wealth of research to show that our imagination, the very faculty we use to foresee our future feelings, systematically misleads us. We are confident we know what will delight us and what will devastate us, and we are wrong, over and over, in predictable ways. It is a humbling, funny, and genuinely useful book about one of the most consequential things we do: trying to imagine our own future happiness.

Here is what Stumbling on Happiness taught me about our faulty imagination, about how we adapt to almost everything, and about why other people’s experience may predict our happiness better than our own forecasts.

Key takeaways

• We are bad at predicting our future feelings, a skill Gilbert calls “affective forecasting.”
• Imagination distorts: it fills in gaps, leaves things out, and assumes the future will feel like now.
• We adapt to almost everything, both good and bad, faster than we expect.
• We overestimate how much events will affect us, the “impact bias.”
• Others’ experience may predict our happiness better than our own imagination.

The faulty imagination

Gilbert’s central subject is “affective forecasting,” our attempts to predict how we will feel in the future, and his central finding is that we are remarkably bad at it. The culprit is imagination, which we trust to show us our future but which systematically distorts. Imagination, Gilbert shows, works like flawed memory and perception: it fills in details that may be wrong, leaves out crucial elements, and, most importantly, projects our present feelings onto the future, assuming that tomorrow will feel much as today does. When we imagine a future event, a new job, a move, a loss, we picture a vivid scene but fail to account for everything that scene leaves out: the ordinary context, the other things that will be happening, the way our feelings will change. And so our forecasts of future happiness and misery are unreliable, shaped more by the quirks of imagination than by what the future will actually be like.

We adapt to almost everything

One of the most important and consoling findings Gilbert presents is the power of human adaptation. We adapt, far faster and more completely than we expect, to both good fortune and bad. The famous (and much-discussed) research suggests that people who win the lottery and people who suffer serious accidents both tend, after a period, to return toward something like their previous level of happiness. We have what Gilbert calls a “psychological immune system” that helps us cope with, rationalise, and adjust to even severe setbacks, so that the catastrophe we dread rarely devastates us as permanently as we fear. And the wonderful thing we long for rarely delights us as lastingly as we hope, because we adapt to it and it becomes the new normal. This produces what Gilbert calls the “impact bias”: we systematically overestimate both the intensity and the duration of our future emotional reactions. The good news is reassuring: we are far more resilient than we predict. The sobering news is that the things we are sure will make us permanently happy usually will not.

Learning from others

Gilbert’s most counterintuitive practical suggestion follows from all this. If our imagination is so unreliable at predicting our future happiness, what should we use instead? His surprising answer: the actual experience of other people who are currently in the situation we are imagining. If you want to know how you will feel after some future event, do not trust your imagination; ask someone who is going through it right now how they actually feel. Because human beings are more alike than we assume, another person’s present experience is, on average, a better predictor of your future feelings than your own imaginative forecast. We resist this, because we are convinced we are unique and special, that our experience will be different. But the research suggests we are wrong: the best crystal ball for our own future happiness is not our imagination but other people’s lived reality. It is a humbling and genuinely useful piece of advice.

What I’m taking with me

Stumbling on Happiness is a delightful, humbling book that changed how I think about my own decisions. What I am taking from Gilbert is the recognition that I am unreliable at predicting my own future happiness, because imagination systematically distorts; the consoling and clarifying truth that I adapt to almost everything, so that both dreaded catastrophes and longed-for triumphs affect me less and more briefly than I expect; and the surprising practical wisdom of trusting other people’s actual experience over my own forecasts. The deepest lesson is liberating: I can hold both my fears and my fantasies about the future more lightly, knowing that, whatever happens, I will likely adapt, and that I am not nearly the prophet of my own joy that I imagine myself to be.

Frequently asked questions

What is Stumbling on Happiness about?

It is Daniel Gilbert’s exploration of why humans are so bad at predicting what will make them happy, drawing on psychology to show how our imagination systematically misleads us about our future feelings.

What is “affective forecasting”?

The attempt to predict how we will feel in the future. Gilbert shows we are poor at it, largely because imagination distorts, leaving out context and projecting our present feelings onto the future.

What is the “impact bias”?

Our tendency to overestimate both how intensely and how long future events will affect us emotionally. Because we adapt to most things, both good and bad events affect us less and more briefly than we predict.

References & further reading

1. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. Knopf, 2006.
2. Wilson, Timothy D. Strangers to Ourselves. Harvard University Press, 2002.
3. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.