Perhaps I shouldn't: after all, it's a massive chain which must control a good deal of the market in books, magazines and music, and therefore at an earlier stage in the process, their very publication. I've even seen the world's biggest Borders, in Kuala Lumpur, though I didn't venture inside.
Nonetheless, having spent 2 hours flicking through pop science and biology texts, I definitely experienced a level of overall contentment that I've not felt for a while. It might have been because sitting on the floor of the shop, wearing a skirt and shirt (I decided this morning that I was fed up with jeans), seemed like an acceptable thing to do. So, perhaps it's really about the kind of people who hang out at Borders, and their relaxed acceptance of unconventional practices, rather than the place itself. I spoke to a geneticist who was trying to decide which books on genes and evolution to invest in. Apparently in Bulgaria, her home country, they studied without formal texts, and she loves new books.
But talking of contentment, this is perhaps the appropriate moment to review Stumbling Upon Happiness, that I've recently ... well, to say I've read it would be a bit unfair. I read the first third. It was slow. It kept promising things for later in the book, and then promising them again further on. Eventually, I cut to the last section of the last chapter, and finally the second-last section of that chapter. It appeared to me that the main thesis of the book was that we cannot accurately predict how we will feel when we achieve a specific end-point. A couple of experiments
seemed to demonstrate that people will in fact more accurately predict how an event will make them feel by reading an account of someone who has experienced the same event, than they will by making predictions based on their personal projections into the future.
This may indeed work quite well in the situations described in these particular experiments. However, applying these conclusions to real life situations where we not only need to predict our own future happiness, but use a selection of such predictions to decide
between a number of situations, is rather more problematic. To start with, in the experiments, participants did not need to make a decision about which future situation they would choose: they were simply given a task, and the subjects in the 'prediction from the account of others' condition were not even told what that task would be. The parallel in real life would be akin to asking someone to tell you how they felt now about an event that was definitely going to happen to you, but that you were as yet unaware of. Clearly, that is not going to help in making choices, because to be able to ask about someone else's experience when making a choice, we need to know what to ask about!
The reviews on Amazon make it pretty clear that I'm not the only one to have noticed that the examples given by Gilbert in support of his argument, those of 'eating chips' or 'losing a pizza', are fairly trite. Anything food-related is pretty weak when it comes to generalising to other areas, since eating is a fairly basic biological necessity! We all eat, essentially for the same reasons, and probably feel pretty similar to one another when we do. We are biologically programmed to eat. But we are not all biologically programmed to choose the
same life partner, or to live in the
same appartment in the
same city. Nor, more meaningfully, are we all programmed to enjoy skiing, or be happier when living with pets.
So even if we could generalise to situations where we know what the options are, and to non-trivial events, how would we actually locate people who had already been through these life-changing decisions that we are contemplating, and how do we know when their situation is comparable anyway? For example, should I leave
my job or stick with it? Asking others might tell me whether they are happier having left
theirs, but is it leaving
a job that is the critical factor affecting happiness, or the leaving of a
particular job? And although we might all imagine that we're more different than we really are, as Gilbert says, but he does not help us to understand where the limits to that similarity are situated.
And what if, actually, it makes me happy to think of myself as different?
