Stumbling on happiness by daniel gilbert

book by Daniel Gilbert

Stumbling on Happiness is a nonfiction book by Daniel Gilbert, published in the United States and Canada in by Knopf. It has been translated into more than thirty languages and is a New York Timesbestseller.^[1]

Theme

Gilbert's central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy.

He argues that imagination fails in three ways:^[2]

1. Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
2. Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
3. Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.

Also, Gilbert covers the topic of 'filling in' or the stumbling on happiness by daniel gilbert summary QICYD