"Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert is probably the best written popular psychology book I read. It is funny, intriguing and a pleasure to read. Here's what I learned from it. If you want details, get the book yourself.
We humans suck at predicting what will make us happy. We even suck at remembering how we felt in the past. We think our future will be mostly like our today (with minor tweaks), but we really have no clue. Our mind projects our current reality into the future, but omits critical details - without realizing it. And it is these details, the ones we just have no information about and can't possibly predict, that influence the future to a degree that makes it often radically different from what we predict.
The book covers various mental mechanisms that cause all this mess, including lots of "stupid" built-in cognitive biases. Gilbert explains scientific experiments that demonstrate how we fool ourselves into believing we remember the past accurately or that our future will be what we think it will. In reality, our memories change over time, and how we feel at the moment and our current beliefs affect what we "remember". Same with predicting how future events will make us feel. For example, we tend to exaggerate how bad we will feel after significant negative events.
The most ugly part of all these mental biases is that even though we keep misremembering and mispredicting all the time, we fail to notice that. It's that sick.
There are several practical implications of what Gilbert writes about.
The first implication has to do with the past. We misremember it, for example we believe that we felt how we now think we must have felt then. It is also impacted by our current emotional state. We know it's better not to trust memories of feelings and events too much. So we can keep a diary; record feelings and thoughts as they happen.
I have started doing it long ago, and after reading the book I've increased the scope and volume of notes taken every week . This is an incredibly valuable source of information. I no longer need to wonder how I felt in the past. I just look into the notes from the past few months and there it is: what I thought about various events and people, or how I felt on a particular day. No more fake memories, no more guessing.
Notes are also great for learning. I record what people said, how to do things, what I learned from projects, or what approaches didn't work. Moreover, I can share all this with others (including you on this blog). Yes, it takes a lot of effort to write this all down and organize what I think, what I experience, what I learn, what other people say. I've created a whole system that makes it easy for me. I use email, mobile phone, and online word processor to collect notes and have them accessible whenever I feel like. I'm always on the lookout for better tools to make this more efficient - but even the results I've gotten so far with rather suboptimal tools are great. I believe this will be huge and critical part of the future: people will record more and more thoughts and events and conversations, extract knowledge from it and share it with others, or apply this knowledge to what they do. I'm just starting probably a bit earlier than others.
Try keeping a diary like this yourself for a year and then play the following game: ask yourself what did you think about given person, relationship or product 6 months or a year ago. Then look at the notes. You will be surprised: "I wrote that?!" I get it a lot. Usually, the more stupid or weird something sounds, the happier I get: it means that I'm learning! (Or I'm fooling myself about this, too, and it's just belief shift - not necessarily in the right direction. Who knows? I'm not that good at introspection to be able to answer that...)
The second implication of the book has to do with the future. We mispredict how future events, especially things we never tried, will affect our mood. When trying to predict such things we should actually ask other people who tried them. It's remarkable how similar we are to one another in that sense. It's been shown that assuming you will feel like other people in similar situation is generally the best known kind of predictor you can use. So if you want to become a doctor, ask other doctors about how they feel about their work, what do they like and what sucks for them. It'll be much more indicative of your own future emotional state than trying to imagine "what it would feel like to be a doctor". You better stop this guesswork right now, seriously. It just doesn't work.
The last implication is that we should try as many activities in life as possible if we want "more fun" or "more enjoyment". We can't predict which of those activities will make us feel great, but some surely will. The idea that you can ask others how they feel when doing certain things only works if you have those other people to ask! And if it doesn't take too much effort. Otherwise the only reasonable way to find out is just to try things for yourself. The reasoning behind this attitude to try out as many things in life as possible doesn't come from the book... It's just a strategy I sympathize with; a strategy to maximize happiness in the long term. The world is huge, and there's so many different ways of living, different kinds of people, countries and cultures, different hobbies and careers and relationships one can build. It's huge opportunity. Try out as many as you can, see what tastes best, go for it, and drop the rest. Note, however, that it takes me a very long time to adopt this attitude fully! Comfort zone is a terrible thing.
If you want more of Gilbert's insights (on related topics), check out his TED talk videos:
The field of cognitive psychology, heuristics and biases is something I'll be touching on more in the future because it's amazingly interesting, and there are things you can do to work around them... to a degree.
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