Pun Salad

So when Tyler Cowen blogged earlier this month about Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness being "so far the best book this year," I was able to latch onto it pretty quickly. And he's right, it's very good.

The author is a psychology prof down at Harvard, and researches happiness; or, specifically, how people tend to go wrong in predicting what will make them happy (or not), and how happy (or not) they'll be after certain events.

It doesn't hurt that Professor Gilbert is probably the funniest guy on the Harvard faculty, and has a gift for presenting even the driest research with a Dave Barry-level gift for humorous exposition.

The book confirms the general thesis: Predictions are difficult—especially about the future. (I've seen this attributed to Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra, and Neils Bohr.) Although Gilbert might also throw in: memory is unreliable, especially about stuff that happened in the past. When you put these together with the hundreds of ways our brains engage in self-deception, it's enough to make one despair.

But don't. I recommend drowning oneself in aphorisms: the journey is the reward; do what you love, love what you do; get over yourself; and don't worry, no matter what happens, eight hundred million Red Chinese still won't give a shit.