After reading The Elements of Style yesterday, this book is at the other end of the spectrum. Instead of just telling me the gist of what I need to know, Daniel goes in depth describing the research and psychology that create a structure around what we just refer to as Happiness.
I am sure the research is insightful, but it isn’t what I am looking for. The bones and structure of the book helped me to better understand and look at happiness but I don’t need to know the details. Having just finished Season 2 of Invisibilia, I appreciated the way Lulu, Alix, and Hanna constructed the information and research into stories.
Daniel opens each chapter with a quote from Shapespeare; if that’s your jam, then this book is for you.
Derek Sivers, who should always be trusted more than me, gave the book a 10/10.
Am I going to read more of it? No
Does the book spark joy? No
PART I - Prospection
The act of looking forward in time or considering the future.
…the human brain’s greatest achievement…conscious experience.
In Part II, “Subjectivity,” I will tell you about the science of happiness.
In Part III, “Realism,” I will tell you about the first shortcoming: Imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently skeptical of its products.
In Part IV, “Presentism,” I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination’s products are … well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.
In Part V, “Rationalization,” …If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.
…in Part VI, “Corrigibility,” I will tell you why illusions of foresight are note easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers.
…I hope you will understand why most of us spend so much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails, only to find that Shangri-la isn’t what and where we thought it would be.
PART II - Subjectivity
The fact that experience is unobservable to everyone but the person having it.
PART III - Realism
The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.
Even though we are aware in some vaguely academic sense that our brains are doing the filling-in trick, we can’t help but expect the future to unfold with the details we imagine.
PART IV - Presentism
The tendency for current experience to influence one’s views of the past and the future.
PART V - Rationalization
The act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable.
For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— Shakespear, Hamlet Prince of Denmark
PART VI - Corrigibility
Ability to be being corrected, reformed, or improved
Afterword
Most of us make at least three important decisions in our lives; where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it…Making these decisions is such a natural part of adulthood that it is easy to forget that we are among the first human beings to make them.
How are we to make these choices?
Daniel Bernoulli claimed…that the wisdom of any decision could be calculated by multiplying the probability that the decision will give us what we want by the utility of getting what we want.