Today I started reading the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. On page 5 already I felt myself being sucked into this book, and I know I will be enjoying it very much and learn something along the way as well. Daniel Gilbert has the gift to be very funny, both in writing and in speaking. I first learned about him when I watched his video on TED, where he talked about synthetic happiness. Seeing the video, made me buy the book, and judging from the first couple of pages it’s going to be worth it.
Some quotes that appealed to me
In the foreword he writes about his fascination of optical illusions and the tricks your mind plays with you. He then takes it a little further:
The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular and systematic.
Okay, food for thought already. He then goes on to say he hasn’t written a manual for happiness, if you want one of those:
Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.
Right…this is going to be interesting.
Then in chapter 1 “Journey to Elsewhen” he starts talking about “The Sentence” and about our unique ability to think about the future:
The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.
I just know I’m going to love his book.
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