The Meaning Of Happiness In Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness

“Stumbling on Happiness”, authored by Daniel Gilbert, is a book that will quite possibly change the way you think and look at with just about everything. Through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. Gilbert argues that imagination fails in three ways; “imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario”. Second, “imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).” And thirdly, “imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actual happen –most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not

How would you define happiness? “Is happiness one of many things a person can value or is happiness what “valuing” means?” Gilbert asks this question when deciding what the real meaning of happiness is. Is it something that comes naturally, or is it something that you have to learn to be? Gilbert explains that there are three different types of happiness, emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness. Each of these types have different meanings that you might think you know, but in reality it is so hard to define

One might think that they are in pain, but in reality you just think that you are in pain. How do people really know what they are feeling? Gilbert uses an example called a “happyometer”. Defining it as, “a perfectly reliable instrument that allows an observer to measure with complete accuracy the characteristics of another person’s subjective experience so that the measurement can be taken, recorded, and compared with another.” If people do not know what they are feeling, how it is happiness measured? Gilbert poses that, “science of happiness requires that we measure happiness.” In order to measure it, one must know the feelings that they are having, and not just think that they know what they’re