Happiness does not stay for long in our mind. It is very rare to have a whirlwind session of happiness in our daily life.  Most of us are thriving day and night together just for a piece of it. Here  comes  Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard College Professor of Psychology, with his book Stumbling on Happiness that wobbles, entices, persuades, tricks, and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was.  It is no doubt why that cutting edge psychological research based book has been conferred this year for the Royal Society’s highest award.

No, Gilbert has not brain-stormed to find the way to happiness. Rather he clearly proclaims that ‘happiness’ is not the key-word for this book and that it is the psychological research work based on the fact how we are searching happiness relentlessly. He shows it as our natural instinct.    

Most of us spend our lives navigating ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why? According to him when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward.

If he is to believe, there is a personal basis of the degree of happiness one gets from a particular substance. Someone likes strawberry in ice-cream while peach is favourtie here for another. This is personal. But wherever you go in this world everyone will tell you unanimously that ice-cream tastes much more better than cod lever oil. So, the more they  opine differently from one another, the more attuned they  are in this respect.

Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. But drawing on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics he argues that just as we err in remembering the past, so we err in imagining the future. On survey he found, those who thought previously that Bush’s election as President for the second consecutive term would be abysmally menacing, are now feeling their life is not that miserable. Like that lover who earlier staunchly believed that the incident of his love go away would leave him groping into the ocean of profound darkness, keeps telling these days, “I knew pretty well that she was not my type.” These are the examples of man’s common habit of metamorphosis his logic with change of time.

So what is the bottom-line? Is there any formula for staying happy? Gilbert has said several times that he is not any “Doctor Happiness”. He just wants to show that the feeling of happiness is nothing but a temporary state of mind. Sometimes we live in it and sometimes we do not. So  permanent happiness is an enigma. It is not at all a problem that you cannot be happy every moment. And where there is no problem, there does not exist any solution either.

Now when you flounder on anything that you have presumed earlier as your elixir for all pains, you better go through this book to know why and how you stumble.