The Best Book on Happiness

Composed in Glen Allen, Virginia--

What's the best book on happiness you've ever read?  Post your response by clicking "comment" below.

Happiness has always been a hot issue.  Everyone wants it, but surprisingly few people actually achieve it.  Some people are happy for short bursts of time, but hardly anyone claims to be happy over the long stretch.

So books on happiness keep getting published and purchased.  I recently read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

Happiness is a fascinating concept. It’s such a deep and personal subject that we can’t even agree on how to define it. Daniel Gilbert has studied why most malcontents seem to avoid happiness, even though they know how to best achieve it. 

It turns out that human beings have several issues that keep them from being happy. First, we simply aren’t very good at predicting our future emotions. Gilbert cites research that many people feel they would be happier living in California, yet researchers have proven that Californians are no happier than Iowans.   

Many married couples conceive children because they think kids will make the couple happier. In truth, parents are on balance no happier than other people, until the children move away from home. 

Judging by the accompanying photograph of  author  Gilbert, one can be reasonably happy sitting alone on a park bench.

Another roadblock to happiness is that the brain plays tricks on us by favoring information we want to receive and filtering out or avoiding information that we don’t. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, most of us do not do what is most likely to ensure happiness. We don’t talk to people who have done the things we think might make us happy.

If we are going to start smoking, for example, we don’t interview senior citizens with lung disease or emphysema. A person who wants to quit his job tends to talk more with the people who still work at the job, rather than people who have quit. If we are going to open a retail store, we don’t talk to many people who run retail stores, let alone people who have formerly run retail stores.

Gilbert style is witty, but his triple and quadruple entendres are sometimes a challenge to decode. He’s funny, but as an academic, Gilbert can’t help trotting out an endless parade of research and case studies to support the book’s premise.

I enjoyed Stumbling On Happiness, but overall the best book on happiness might be a good Italian cookbook.

What's the best book on happiness you've ever read?

Comments

[Brad Walker]

The best book on happiness I have ever read is the Bible.