Читать книгу Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert - Страница 17

To be perfectly honest, I won’t just be mentioning the surprisingly wrong answer; I’ll be pounding and pummelling it until it gives up and goes home. The surprisingly wrong answer is apparently so sensible and so widely believed that only a protracted thrashing has any hope of expunging it from our conventional wisdom. So before the grudge match begins, let me share with you my plan of attack.

• In Part II, ‘Subjectivity’, I will tell you about the science of happiness. We all steer ourselves toward the futures that we think will make us happy, but what does that word really mean? And how can we ever hope to achieve solid, scientific answers to questions about something as gossamer as a feeling?

• We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time. Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be. Imagination suffers from three shortcomings that give rise to the illusions of foresight with which this book is chiefly concerned. In Part III, ‘Realism’, I will tell you about the first shortcoming: imagination works so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we are insufficiently sceptical of its products.

• In Part IV, ‘Presentism’, I will tell you about the second shortcoming: Imagination’s products are…well, not particularly imaginative, which is why the imagined future often looks so much like the actual present.

• In Part V, ‘Rationalization’, I will tell you about the third shortcoming: imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.

• Finally, in Part VI, ‘Corrigibility’, I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.

By the time you finish these chapters, I hope you will understand why most of us spend so much of our lives turning rudders and hoisting sails, only to find that Shangri-la isn’t what and where we thought it would be.