"Stumbling on Happiness"

I'm reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. The wonderful Maria Popova put me on to it, with this quote: "human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished". It gives an accessible, breezy account of the Psychology of happiness, rooted firmly in empirical science - not at all a self-help book.

At the end of Chapter 9 he gives a very condensed summary of some key points:

We've seen how difficult it is to predict accurately our emotional reactions to future events because it is difficult to imagine them as they will happen, and difficult to imagine how we'll think about them once they do. Throughout this book I've compared imagination to perception and memory, and I've tried to convince you that foresight is just as fallible as hindsight and eyesight.

When I worked on mature student Access I was often struck, at the end of the year, by the transformative effects for the students. They stood a teeny bit straighter. There was a little gleam in their eyes. They had a new air of confidence and direction. Helping to make this happen felt like a privilege. Now I'd like to understand a little better what I was seeing.

I haven't finished Stumbling on Happiness yet. I don't know yet if there is a surprising punchline, or indeed if it will help me understand what I saw on Access but I do think that comment about "works in progress" is at the heart of it, that it is profoundly, deeply human to learn and change through learning, a sort of growth possible for the person even in adulthood, an expression of our relationship with time.