Stumbling on Happiness

More like Stumbling on Crappiness. This book was the shits. Pardon mon francais. I almost never set a book down in the middle of it. I have OCD about finishing things, but when I was in the middle of this book I thought of something that I had read on the happiness project blog which was: if you are reading a book you hate, stop reading it. There are far too many books in the world and you are wasting your time. So, I stopped reading it and didn't look back. Surprisingly I stumbled into happiness by not reading this book.

Here's the thing that I hated about it. Over-generalizations and no explanations. I thought the book would be more, here's the problem and here's a solution to find your happiness. Instead, I found the book to be all our minds will make us forget what makes us happy or unhappy and why. So, it's virtually impossible to actually try to be happy because our minds aren't built that way. Ummmmmmmmm, thanks.

I don't buy it. Our minds may not be able to predict future happiness, but that doesn't make us unhappy. And I think there is a good purpose for our minds forgetting things. Like right now, with my new puppy, I forget that he can be a nipping little monster while I am away from him and only remember him cuddling against my lap last night. But that helps me to miss him and helps me to be excited to see him. Which does in fact make me happy. So suck it Daniel Gilbert and your dumb science experiments.

I also didn't like the writing. It was all here's what we think will happen, here's a science experiment to refute it and here's the doom and gloom of how we will always be wrong. It didn't flow and felt like the exact same thing being said over and over again.

This was the worst book I have read in a long ass time. Possibly the worst book that I have read ever. 0 stars both because I hated it and because I did not finish it. If I could give the book negative stars I would.