Daniel Gilbert may refer to:
People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.
If I wanted to know what a certain future would feel like to me, I would find someone who is already living that future. If I wonder what it's like to become a lawyer or marry a busy executive or eat at a particular restaurant, my best bet is to find people who have actually done these things and see how happy they are.
Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It's a system that's supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That's how the system guides you through the world.
The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?
Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.
In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.
In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.
Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written.
We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.
I actually think the same things do make most people happy. The differences are extremely small, and around the margins. You like peach ice cream; I like strawberry ice cream. Both of us like ice cream much better than a smack on the head with two-by-four.
Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.
I have everything that I could possibly want in life, from a gorgeous granddaughter and a wonderful wife, brilliant students, the best job anyone could hope for, and about half of my hair. Not the half I would have kept, but no one consulted me.
The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.
Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.
The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you're rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.
No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking.