By Eva Ciabattoni

In “Stumbling on Happiness” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert explains why little annoyances are more difficult to stomach than life’s larger traumas.

Having just been asked to pay $45 for a technician to look at my garage door and tell me it’s not covered by my home warranty, then stonewalled by a customer service rep, who informed me that on top of being a freelance writer apparently I should be a garage door parts expert, then asked if he could “help” me with anything further, I was curious why this relatively minor incident left me seething.

Gilbert informs me that, “When experience makes us feel sufficiently unhappy, the psychological immune system cooks facts and shifts blame in order to offer us a more positive view … but these defenses are not triggered by small threats. The paradoxical consequence … is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.” Ah.

This paradox is one of the factors that makes us overestimate the consequences of tragedies to our happiness, and is thus one of the factors that makes us unable to foretell accurately our future happiness.

The book is divided into five major parts that examine why we so often navigate toward futures that make us less happy than we thought they would.

• Subjectivity - Explores what happiness means and whether it means different things to different people.

• Realism - The imagination is a magician, performing its tricks of filling in memories and leaving out future details so seamlessly that we are duped by the result.

• Presentism - When the imagination envisions the future, it tends to spackle the gaps with a material called the present.

• Rationalization - The reason we have so much difficulty predicting how we will feel about the future once we get there.

• Corrigibility - How our desire to feel unique, false beliefs transmitted through society and the uneven weighting of our experiences make it difficult to put corrective lenses on our foresight.

Gilbert does a fine job distilling loads of research into a readable, humorous text. At times, however, “Stumbling” falters by reducing complex questions too much in an attempt at simplicity.

Studies about volunteers reporting about potato chip eating were supposed to demonstrate that coaching from people who have been there could give us accurate data to inform our own decisions. I would argue that potato chip eating is less complex than, say, moving to Timbuktu, and that my experience of Timbuktu might well be different from that of one who has gone before, even if we agree on matters of salty snack consumption.

Ditto the study on the 2000 presidential election, which showed that people predicted they would feel worse with the outcome than they did, but that four months later, they remembered feeling as bad as they had predicted, not as they had actually felt. This leaves out that while the election was a one-time event, the result of the election was ongoing - that is, that the rationalization mechanism may have kicked in on the day of the election, while the ongoing reality was the primary consideration four months later.

I’ve read the book cover to cover twice, and every time I open it, I find myself pulled right back in. There is a ton of material to digest here.

Find “Stumbling on Happiness” at the Los Altos library.