not just random

I recently finished Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness.

Much less about giving answers on how to be happy and more about understanding our methods of making decisions and predicting how we will enjoy today’s decisions in the future, this really is as much popular psychology as it shows applications of critical thinking.

Happiness is likely something that most people strive for, consciously or not. It appears then that understanding of oneself and understanding (and actively questioning) how to achieve happiness (or really other goals, for that matter) should be high on people’s agenda.

Surely, everyone will sit down in introspection at some point to think about what it is that they need to provide them with happiness. More often than not, of course this pursuit of happiness happens much more on the fly, too. This books presents interesting thoughts on how we make our decisions in this regard - and how we tend to be wrong about them.

Highly recommended.