Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness is not about happiness so much as it is about why our pursuit of happiness so often has disappointing results. Gilbert (Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University) presents quite a bit of well-organized information about the foibles of the human psyche and imagination in this witty and enjoyable book.

We think we know what will make us happy, and yet sometimes the things we work so hard for bring only brief contentment, if not disappointment or outright misery, if we finally manage to get them. Gilbert puts this in terms of our future selves, whose cholesterol levels and job satisfaction and financial comfort we spend so much time fretting over and for whom we give up so much present pleasure, yet who so often look back and shake their heads and wonder, “What on earth was I thinking?” The book is about why we so often misjudge what our future selves will find satisfying.

The short answer is that our minds are subject to various failings when we try to imagine our futures, similar to the optical illusions to which our eyes are subject. Gilbert wrote the book to explore the ways that these failures, which are consistent from human to human, illuminate the process of cognition about the future (which is, he says, the thing separating us from all the other animals on the earth).

In the first section of the book, Gilbert goes into some of the problems inherent in the study of something as subjective as feelings of happiness, and illustrates that although the subject is indeed fraught with difficulties, personal descriptions of present feelings are as accurate a report as we’re going to get, and these reports become scientifically useful when we gather large numbers of them for comparison and averaging.

Gilbert then groups human errors of imagination into three types and describes each type, complete with lots of interesting and often amusing evidence from psychological studies of human behavior.

The first type of error is that when we are filling in gaps in reality with something imagined, we do it so quickly and effortlessly that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Gilbert gives a number of frankly disheartening examples of how flawed our perceptions of reality are, and how prone to interpolations based on suggestion or expectation. For example, the subjects in one experiment who heard the word “eel” preceded by a cough in a variety of sentences thought they heard either the word “heel” or the word “peel” depending on which word fit into the context of the sentence, even if they couldn’t determine which word would fit better until the end of the sentence and the word “eel” occurred near the beginning. Imagination also kicks in and colors our perceptions of what an event will mean—in other words, we interpret generic concepts like parties in a particular way, rather than realizing that there are multiple types of party—and this happens so automatically that we don’t realize that what we’re picturing might not match reality when the reality gets here.

The second type of error is that when our imagination is filling in the gaps for us, it doesn’t go all that far for its material, and so we tend to see the future as more like the present than it really will be. For example, if you’re like many Americans, at some point last Thursday evening you probably thought that you might never eat again after all that Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing and pie. Or at least it would be awhile before you felt like eating. But maybe by the end of the evening, or certainly by the next morning, there you were at the table as usual. Gilbert gives other examples of studies that show how our present experience unrealistically influences our concepts of what we will want to do in the future. We forget that the context will change in a variety of ways and our feelings will change with it.

The third error of imagination involves the ways we adapt to something once it has happened through a variety of rationalizations that we don’t foresee. This was also a fairly disheartening section; it seems that we view not reality but a filtered reality that our brain judges to be positive enough to keep us going but with enough negative feedback to allow us to change course when necessary. Gilbert uses our physiological immune system as an analog for the psychological immune system that balances our view of reality by, for example, finding good in the painful things that we don’t have much choice about. The whole book, but this section in particular, left me feeling a bit discouraged about how well we humans can grasp reality. On the one hand, we do manage to muddle through with what we’ve got, and the mental mechanisms that Gilbert talks about do have some positive consequences. But on the other hand, as with some of our anatomical features, our perceptions of the world sometimes seem to be those of a creature whose software and hardware still contain some bugs.

At the beginning of the book, Gilbert promises that later he will give us a solution to our problems of faulty forecasting, but that we almost certainly won’t make use of it. At the end of the book he suggests that the best way to determine whether a particular situation or course of action will make us happy is to look at people who are presently in that situation and see what they say about how happy they are. He closes with some discussion of why most people will reject this suggestion: basically, we think we’re more distinctive and individual and our situations are more peculiar than they are. It’s interesting that in the book he quotes Tim Wilson, who wrote an excellent book (Strangers to ourselves) about the many ways that our brains process information outside of conscious awareness, and how this subconscious processing influences our behavior without our being aware of it. Wilson makes a similar suggestion in his book, namely, that we can understand ourselves better not by trusting our own feelings and perceptions about who we are or what would be best for us, but by listening to what close and trusted family and friends say about us (he also predicted that people would not act on his suggestion).

Whether you take Gilbert’s advice or not, you’ll probably enjoy reading the book and learn some fascinating things about how your mind works.

My younger son recently discovered Annie Dillard’s books and recommended several of them to me, including For the Time Being. Before I had a chance to read it, I took a weekend trip to Chicago to see, among other things, the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum. The exhibit was impressive and oddly moving. I was struck by how many of the artifacts were meant to protect the dead in their travels through the next world. All that time and effort and money spent on the safe passage of dead rulers through an imaginary afterlife! Why? When I expressed that thought to Patrick in an email message, he said that I really ought to read For the Time Being, because in it Annie Dillard shares similar thoughts on the Chinese emperor Qin, who was buried roughly 2,200 years ago with thousands of life-size clay soldiers.

So I went to the library and checked out a copy. It’s a difficult book to sum up, but here are some of my thoughts. For the Time Being is a loosely linked collection of beautifully written essays. The topics that recur in each set of essays include birth defects, human population statistics, Eastern European Judaism, sand, clouds, the life and work of Teilhard de Chardin (paleontologist and priest), and Emperor Qin and his clay soldiers. The themes that tie this diverse material together are our mortality and vulnerability, and the tension between our feelings that we and those we love are uniquely special and important, and our knowledge of the vast numbers of other humans, past and present, with whom we share the planet.

I had a hard time coming to grips with a lot of the Jewish theology, because I don’t believe in God and thus see no reason to try to figure out his attributes or motivations. Sometimes I can see spiritual or religious ideas as metaphors and gain some understanding from them even if I can’t take them literally, but most of the theology that Dillard covered left me fairly cold. I’m sure my understanding of the book would benefit from a second reading, and maybe I’d see how the theology fits into the rest of it.

I did, however, find many Thinking Meat sorts of themes in the rest of the book. Dillard uses lovely images from nature as metaphors for the constant turnover of human generations:

“Our generations rise and break like foam on shores.”

And this, about the standing wave in the wake of a boat:

“Each crest tumbled upon itself and released a slide of white foam. The foam’s individual bubbles popped and dropped into the general sea while they were still sliding down the dark wave. They trailed away always, and always new waters peaked, broke, foamed, and replenished.”

And the clay soldiers are human simulacra that reflect the way we rise up out of the earth and return to it. The knowledge of the rising and falling of the generations and our own small place in the stream of humankind is not always comfortable:

“Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s. The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?”

The statistics that thread through the book emphasize the sheer numbers of humans; some of the statistics are about disasters (like a typhoon that hit Bangladesh in 1991 and killed 138,000 people) or other occasions of mass death like the atrocities of Pol Pot’s and Stalin’s regimes. Throughout the book Dillard asks how we can continue to find human life sacred and feel the magnitude of the loss when the numbers become mind-numbingly huge. To be truly aware of the individuality of each person lost in a catastrophe (or the humanity we share with babies born with birth defects, especially some of the more horrifying ones she describes) is too heart-rending. She quotes Ernest Becker, who said that “a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane.”

I understand what she means. It strikes me that one of the most heartbreaking things about 9/11 was the way we learned a lot about many of the victims, not just their names or their jobs but little quirky things about who they were. The New York Times, in its “Portraits of Grief” (later gathered in a book) provided glimpses of the ordinary lives that were ended so abruptly. My mother died not quite a year before 9/11, and the stories about each individual’s story and family brought home to me that the loss and the grief that we felt was multiplied by so many families who suffered losses that day. It’s too sad to think about for very long.

And yet we never want to forget the people we love who have died. All we can do now is hold them in memory in all their specificity. And one of the ways we value our own lives is by remembering and cherishing even the smallest details of existence. Dillard gathers together a surprisingly large number of reports of clouds, observed and recorded by John Muir, John Constable, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others. “Why seek dated clouds?” Dillard asks. “Why save a letter, take a snapshot, write a memoir, carve a tombstone?”

That consciousness of posterity and the wish to leave things behind that people will remember us by is totally human but in the very long run, of course, it’s unrealistic. Dillard writes about the hominid footprints discovered in Tanzania by Mary Leakey; these were likely left by three of our distant Australopithecus ancestors, a man, a woman, and a child. The footprints were preserved for millennia by fortuitous circumstances, and it’s proving unexpectedly difficult for us to continue to preserve them. What struck me the most, though, is that for all our contemporary efforts to leave traces of ourselves behind, Dillard points out that even though we don’t know where those hominids were going or why, or why the woman hesitated at one point, “We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as those three barefoot ones did.” Did I mention that the book tends toward the melancholy, and is not always easy to read?

The urge to preserve our memories and the material objects that tie us to them is related to our belief that we and our times are special, and I feel it as strongly as anyone. That’s one of the reasons I write (to capture what it’s like to be here at this place and time). But it’s also one reason I read (to learn what others have to say about their places and times). Dillard talks about whether we really do live, as we often feel we do, at a special juncture in history; she says our times are “ordinary times, a slice of life like any other”, and that we are “[o]rdinary beads on a never-ending string”. “New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?” We resist that thought just as we resist the idea that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s.

The book is so diverse and episodic that it’s hard to sum it up, and I’m sure that a second reading would bring different facets of it to light. One of the images that stays with me the most poignantly from this reading is that of a nurse washing newborn babies in something of an assembly line procedure. (I love Dillard’s description of an obstetrical ward in a hospital as “…surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out.”) The image of the continuous stream of babies, picked up at one end of a counter, bathed and dressed and wrapped snugly in a blanket and then set at the other end, is balanced by the way the nurse addresses each baby as she picks it up: “Now you.” That image provides one way to sum up the book: it’s a beautiful if often disturbing exploration of the tension between the realization that we are beads on a never-ending chain, and our need to address each other in the moment as a specific and irreplaceable “you.”

Martin Seligman is the founder of the Positive Psychology movement, a shift in attention to the psychology of functional rather than dysfunctional states of mind. Rather than asking how to heal the troubled, Positive Psychology asks how to help people make their lives as good as possible. Seligman has written several books that shade over into self-help, although his work and his recommendations are much better supported by research than many other self-help books. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment takes the somewhat fuzzy concept of happiness and dissects it neatly, linking happiness to the development and exercise of character strengths.

Seligman describes the various contributors to happiness (your characteristic set-point, your circumstances, and your voluntary control over your thoughts). He makes the point that a set-point is actually more like a range, and you can often move to the high end of your range even if you can’t change the range itself.

The data about which circumstances matter, and how much, were particularly interesting. Education, race, climate, and gender, for example, seem to have little effect; life satisfaction rises with age, which pleasant affect (good feelings) rises slightly and negative affect stays the same. Religion is linked to optimism for the future, which in turn is linked to happiness. (The more fundamentalist the religious beliefs, the greater the optimism. So are fundamentalists happier? I can’t remember if the book said this straight out, and even if they are, I’d still rather be an atheist.)

A “rich and fulfilling social life” was linked to happiness, although the cause-and-effect relationship is not clear (are people happier because they socialize more, or are happy people more likely to socialize, or is there some other factor underlying both the happiness and the socialibility?). Time spent alone is one of the measures of what kind of social life you have, which leads me to wonder how introversion is taken into account. What looks like an abundant social life for someone like me, who needs a lot of time alone, might look pretty sparse to an extrovert, but it could still be plenty rich and fulfilling.

The voluntary factors take up a good deal more of the book than the discussion of circumstances and inherent capacity for happiness. Seligman suggests that we can feel happy about the past, the future, and the present. He describes some ways to cultivate more positive thoughts and feelings about the past (gratitude, fulfillment, pride, serenity) and the future (optimism, hope, faith, trust), but the bulk of the advice is about cultivating happiness about the present. He makes the distinction (crucial in my opinion) between pleasures and gratifications. The former he divides up into bodily pleasures and higher pleasures; they are “about the senses and the emotions”, and they are subject to decrease through habituation. Building up the habit of savoring our pleasures, perhaps limiting our indulgence in some of them, and practicing mindfulness are ways to counter this decrease.

The gratifications, on the other hand, are “about enacting personal strengths and virtues”; they might not always feel good at every stage of the process, but they provide the deep satisfaction and fulfillment that Seligman sees as essential to happiness. He suggests that the pleasures are the reward for doing something that’s good for the body, and gratification is the reward for building up psychological capital that benefits us mentally. The personal strengths and virtues that we exercise are part of what used to be called character; Seligman believes that character needs to be resurrected as a viable concept in the social sciences. He describes a search for positive character traits that are valued in religions and cultures all through recorded history and around the world; the search identified wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, and spirituality and transcendence. He describes the 24 character strengths associated with these six virtues; everyone, he says, can work to improve these strengths in themselves, and applying these strengths to the situations in your life is what will bring you gratification and happiness in the present.

You can take a quiz in the book or online at the Authentic Happiness web site that will give you a listing of your top strengths. The ones you identify as your signature strengths—that appear high on your list and that feel the most integral to who you are—are the ones you should strive to find ways to use in your job and in your personal life. The three penultimate chapters describe applying this knowledge in your job, in your marriage, and in parenting.

The final chapter was, I have to admit, a major disappointment. I thought that applying your best characteristics to a worthwhile goal here in this world is a noble enough path to take through life and not a bad way of spending your time on this planet. Being part of the human race, part of the life of the planet (and trying not to be such a destructive part), and part of the universe gives plenty of meaningful context to my life. However, Seligman in his final chapter suggests that there is something more to aspire to. He mentions Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which suggests that evolution is proceeding toward a goal, and that humankind is evolving toward a future of greater cooperation (win-win games, rather than the zero-sum win-lose games that characterize so much human interaction) and that we will outgrow our less lovable behaviors like greed and hatred. (I haven’t read the book, so I’m summarizing what I’ve learned about it from Seligman’s book and from reviewers. I’d love to hear from anyone who has read it.)

Seligman’s take on this is that maybe the negative emotions are there to warn us away from things, and the positive emotions are there to tell us of opportunities for cooperation and growth, although I’m still unclear about why the latter should come to predominate over time. Seligman says that if you take God to be omniscient, omnipotent, and good (leaving out the creator aspect which has caused so many theological conundrums), maybe that’s what humanity is evolving toward. Personally I don’t need for humanity to be evolving toward godhood in order to feel like my life has plenty of meaning and purpose, and I was disappointed that a book that was overall so grounded in research should drag these religious speculations in toward the end. (Being here is enough!) Still, there was some good information in the book and it was worth reading for the ways it clarified some of the concepts involved and summarized some relevant research.