“If I find the right person and get married, I’ll be happy.”

“If I get that great job, I’ll be happy.”

“If I retire early, I’ll be happy.”

“If I take a year off and travel, I’ll be happy.”

Sound familiar? Have you ever had these things actually happen and not been as happy as you had predicted? In the past, you may have believed this was because you lacked perspective or were just naturally unhappy person. I know I’ve been down that path before. Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist, and author of the book “Stumbling on Happiness” offers an alternate solution.

Gilbert contends that people are incessantly wrong about predicting what will make them happy. He explains with both anecdotal and scientific studies that humans are just not capable of imagining future events and how they will feel accurately.

As evidence, Gilbert cites studies that demonstrate that a large majority of people who endure major traumas (war, break-ups, car accidents, rape) in their lives will return to a pre-trauma emotional state – in fact, many of them will report that they ended up happier than before the traumatic event. It’s as if we’re equipped with a gage that is constantly rebooting us back to our own baseline emotional state.

This concept may be more clear if you’ve ever had reminisced about a shared memory with a friend or family member. Somehow even though you may have been absolutely convinced of the order and details of a particular incident, others will have equally strong convictions of a different memory. It has been definitively proven that people use both selective and replacement memory techniques of past events.

Since we misremember how things that we have already experienced felt, we also mispredict how they will feel again in the future. The classic example here is childbirth, which women seem to misremember not being that bad. Gilbert says, “we expect the next car, the next house or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won’t.”

What gets us through life is the right amount of delusion! Just enough to fool us into feeling relatively good about ourselves, but not so much as to exceed our own credulity.

“If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning,” Gilbert explains. “Yet if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our own slippers.”

What has been reinforced for me from this book is that we all need to find our happiness in the present and from within. If life experience hasn’t taught us that external factors do not produce true serenity, then this book will definitely convince the reader that time is of the essence – find your smile today!