Interesting, annoying book
28 Jan 2007 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecatI saw a bunch of recommendations, I don't remember where, for Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, so I got it out of the library. Gilbert is a professor of psychology, and the premise of the book is that people can't accurately predict what will make them happy.
I am very interested in the psychology of happiness and other positive emotions. It's a field that began taking shape in the early 1980s - before that, psychologists almost always focused on negative emotions. If it had begun just a little bit earlier, before I graduated from college, I might just have continued on studying psychology.
I found Gilbert's book an interesting read but I was annoyed for several reasons.
1. He uses the first person plural all the time. I know that to non-persnickety people, the first person plural doesn't mean "everybody" but "many" or "most". But after over a decade of reading Usenet I can't read it that way, so I kept having this "It's not true that everybody reacts that way!" reaction to things the author said.
2. (This part both annoyed me and made me feel smug.) He uses various thought experiments in the book "Now suppose X...what will your reaction be? Would it be A or B?" Then he says, "Of course your reaction was A; most people react A because yada yada." But my reaction was more often B. I don't know if this is because
a. he got it wrong,
b. the studies he reported were lame,
c. the studies he reported were had non-representative samples (many psych studies use college students, and some subset of those use only male college students...I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two since college),
d. i'm more knowledgeable about psychology than most people because i have a degree in it,
e. i'm more knowledgeable about myself than most people,
f. something else
3. I finally got totally fed up when toward the end of the book I encountered these two statements on back to back pages:
a. "The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathin with twelve billion eyes..." (there are several irritating things about that statement; a no-prize to anyone who guesses which one annoyed me the most)
b. "The average American moves more than six times, changes jobs more than ten times, and marries more than once, which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor choices." (I assume I don't need to go into all the reasons that conclusion from the statistics given is ridiculous.)
What I did get out of the book is the notion that people often make decisions based on something other than maximizing their happiness. Gilbert spins it this way: this is is a failure; people are trying to maximize their happiness and failing because of lack of self-knowledge. But how I spin it is this: People understand that happiness isn't always the most important thing. I'm glad to know many people work this way, because I don't think it's the most important thing at all. I guess I kind of think it's like air, something you need a certain amount of and suffer if you don't have enough but you don't need to maximize.
I couldn't relate to many of the experiments he described and used to back up his theory, because they focus on people rating how happy they are and how happy they predict they will be over some small outcome. I've never been asked to participate in such an experiment, but thinking about it annoys me because I can't imagine being asked to rate my happiness. Unless something completely amazing or completely awful has happened, my happiness is more or less on neutral; I can usually identify happiness about one or two things happening in my life right at the moment but I can also identify several irritants; how do I rate that?
I am very interested in the psychology of happiness and other positive emotions. It's a field that began taking shape in the early 1980s - before that, psychologists almost always focused on negative emotions. If it had begun just a little bit earlier, before I graduated from college, I might just have continued on studying psychology.
I found Gilbert's book an interesting read but I was annoyed for several reasons.
1. He uses the first person plural all the time. I know that to non-persnickety people, the first person plural doesn't mean "everybody" but "many" or "most". But after over a decade of reading Usenet I can't read it that way, so I kept having this "It's not true that everybody reacts that way!" reaction to things the author said.
2. (This part both annoyed me and made me feel smug.) He uses various thought experiments in the book "Now suppose X...what will your reaction be? Would it be A or B?" Then he says, "Of course your reaction was A; most people react A because yada yada." But my reaction was more often B. I don't know if this is because
a. he got it wrong,
b. the studies he reported were lame,
c. the studies he reported were had non-representative samples (many psych studies use college students, and some subset of those use only male college students...I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two since college),
d. i'm more knowledgeable about psychology than most people because i have a degree in it,
e. i'm more knowledgeable about myself than most people,
f. something else
3. I finally got totally fed up when toward the end of the book I encountered these two statements on back to back pages:
a. "The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathin with twelve billion eyes..." (there are several irritating things about that statement; a no-prize to anyone who guesses which one annoyed me the most)
b. "The average American moves more than six times, changes jobs more than ten times, and marries more than once, which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor choices." (I assume I don't need to go into all the reasons that conclusion from the statistics given is ridiculous.)
What I did get out of the book is the notion that people often make decisions based on something other than maximizing their happiness. Gilbert spins it this way: this is is a failure; people are trying to maximize their happiness and failing because of lack of self-knowledge. But how I spin it is this: People understand that happiness isn't always the most important thing. I'm glad to know many people work this way, because I don't think it's the most important thing at all. I guess I kind of think it's like air, something you need a certain amount of and suffer if you don't have enough but you don't need to maximize.
I couldn't relate to many of the experiments he described and used to back up his theory, because they focus on people rating how happy they are and how happy they predict they will be over some small outcome. I've never been asked to participate in such an experiment, but thinking about it annoys me because I can't imagine being asked to rate my happiness. Unless something completely amazing or completely awful has happened, my happiness is more or less on neutral; I can usually identify happiness about one or two things happening in my life right at the moment but I can also identify several irritants; how do I rate that?
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no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 02:23 am (UTC)"Happiness", being used as a translation of "εὐδαιμονία", "eudaimonia" -- that's much higher on my list.
If you're saying that "happiness", meaning "eudaimonia", rather than "a transitory state of pleaure" is the most important thing to you, well, I'd say that's a very sane and reasonable state to be in.
Aristotle described eudaimonia as a state of life in which you live your life according to virtues, with good health, enough food and shelter, good friendships which are mutually beneficial (they're not mooching off of you; you're getting something out of it, too), respect and a good reputation from your community, and learning of scientific knowlege.
Which, frankly, all sounds pretty damn good to me.
Epicurius disagreed and said that eudaimonia had to do with simple pleasure. However, he also said that a thinking being should make choices to maximize his pleasure over his lifetime, and so, really, in practice, a life lived by Epicurius's principles would probably not look THAT much different from Aristotle's. And that also sounds like it could be pretty similar to what you're saying.
But, me, I'm more in Aristotle's camp on this one. And, for that matter, the camp of the Stoics.
For me, I make my choices first on what is honorable, ethical, moral, and right. My second area of choice is what is best for people and causes important to me (don't get me wrong: I am one of those people and causes important to me; just not the only one). My third area of choice is if I believe it will bring me pleasure.
Now, naturally, the vast majority of choices I make have no real honor, ethics, moral, or "best interest" factors. None of those things are going to determine whether I have coffee ice cream or vanilla ice cream -- those decisions are going to be based simply on which I believe will bring me more pleasure.
But, to me, the word "happiness" seems to correlate to "pleasure", and, while that's a good thing, it's not the most important thing to me.
"Right living" is more important to me, which correlates to eudaimonia -- and correlates to "joy", more than "pleasure" or "happiness".
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 04:53 am (UTC)Now, some do, and I think the majority of the really good psychologists I've known have a solid background in philosophy, or literature, or both -- maybe academic, maybe self-taught.
The problem is that a lot of psychologists are trying to deal with philosophical issues without having the background. A psychologist who DOES have the philosophy background can be extremely effective -- and literature also helps, since that's another field that really attempts to study people.
I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to denegrate psychology as a useful healing profession. Just that I think that some psychologists are attempting to deal with questions which wise people have already been dealing with for a long time, and they hamstring themselves by not studying the existing literature. Even if that literature was written in ancient Greek, or Sanskrit, or ancient Chinese, or Latin, or Hebrew, or Aramaic. (Aristotle, Epicurius, Solon, Maritus, the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tse Tung all have really useful and pragmatic things to teach. And I just think that people attempting to give advice on what life should consist of should at least have some familiarity with what other people have come up with. Agree or disagree with it, the existing body of work gives a foundation that it is foolish to ignore.)
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 05:43 am (UTC)Training in philosophy/lit
Date: 29 Jan 2007 08:23 pm (UTC)Hear, hear.
(I did a philosophy major, as well as a computer science major)
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 08:58 pm (UTC)I don't equate happiness with momentary pleasure at all. I think of it as a more general state, and in fact, a state that can include periods of unhappiness - anger, anxiety, grief, etc. If I were to ask someone if they were happy and they said yes, I wouldn't assume that meant they never cried or had a fight with someone. Life throws crap at you. But to me, happiness - at least the kind of happiness I want in my life - comes from feeling more or less content with what I have, and comfortable with who I am. The absence of either these things seriously impinges on my ability to be happy.
I would consider a life that consisted of nothing but a bunch of disconnected, momentary pleasures to be a very empty and unsatisfying life. (Speaking strictly for myself, here.) If all I had in life were momentary pleasures, I think I'd be pretty horrified. I would see life as a string of meaningless diversions, which perhaps would be the only thing standing between me and some terrible void.
Actually, I've been there before, many years ago - a time when getting stoned, eating junk food, and playing the same songs over and over were my only pleasures. Sure, I felt momentarily happy while indulging in those pleasures, but it didn't last, and then I was once again confronted with the terror of not having a clue who I was or what I wanted to do with myself. All I could do was slavishly grasp onto those pleasures - it didn't feel like a healthy *choosing* of joy at all.
I'm also an ethical person, but I'm not at all formal about it. Concepts such as "right living" feel too abstract for me to grab onto. I don't aspire to "virtue" *for its own sake*. I'm more comfortable feeling my way around moral choices - I know what feels right in a given situation. Or, perhaps I don't always know what feels right, because the choices are complex, so I agonize over the dilemma. But I'm not sure I'd trust a person whose morality was so sure and unbending that they always knew what was right in every situation. :)
Ever since I was old enough to seriously reflect on myself, I've known that my goal in life was happiness. But when I tell people this, they seem almost disapproving, as though I'm saying that all I want is my own pleasure. Maybe that word triggers certain associations in others that I, for whatever reason, don't have.
In my mind, being happy means, more or less, "having my shit together". It means I'm comfortable with myself, I respect who I am, I accept my limitations, and maybe I even enjoy who I am. It means feeling satisfied with what I have in life - socially, emotionally, materially. It means not feeling deprived, or resentful/envious of what other people have, not putting a large part of my energy into longing for things I don't have.
So to the extent that contentment requires the ability to attain social fulfillment (in terms of intimacy, friendship, and community), my goal is to work on breaking down the barriers I have to getting those things. And to the extent that it also requires making peace with what I can and can't have, my goal is to heal old wounds that keep me longing for things just out of reach, so I can enjoy what is within reach.
From those things, I believe, flow all other joys in life: creativity, love, passion, growth, a positive outlook, generosity, compassion, connection.
no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2007 09:57 pm (UTC)The author seems to be equating it with momentary pleasure, at least based on the majority of the psych experiments he uses to provide evidence for his points. So that's what I meant when I said that happiness is not all that important - I don't care all that much about maximizing my pleasure in the moment in comparison to some other things, and it sounds like a lot of other people don't, either. (Either that, or if you believe the author, they do care and constantly fail at it.)
no subject
Date: 30 Jan 2007 03:31 am (UTC)For instance, feeling your way around situations and not being overly rigid about it would be a virture.
So, as far as I can tell, your philosphy of life and Aristotle's are more-or-less the same.
This gives you word to work with. When you say your goal in life is "happiness", it sounds like you mean "happiness" the way that Thomas Jefferson meant it when he said that "among these [Creator-endowed rights] are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". And "pursuit of happiness" was more-or-less how Jefferson was translating "eudaemonia."
So, if people sound disapproving when you say that "happiness" is your goal, you can use the word "eudaemonia" instead.
Which won't actually help, since they won't know what it means, either, but you'll sound all smart and shit.