Thursday 1 June 2006

Stumbling on Happiness

Every now and then you stumble across a wonderful book that you only picked up because of the strange title whilst browsing the bookshelves waiting for another delayed flight - well this is one of those little gems.

The essence of the book is that we try and do the things today that we think will make us happy tomorrow and when we get there we are often saddened to discover that we made the wrong choices and worse than that we are so ungrateful towards the idiot who made those choices.

How can this happen, shouldn't we be the best people to judge what the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will become next year (or at least tomorrow)?

Well the book explains why we are typically so poor at it and it does give some tips on how to be a little better at enjoying life.

There are echoes in here of the truths about humans very poor ability to detect true correlations and causal relationships that also popped up in The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

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