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Imagine you’ve won the lottery and can now buy just about anything you want and all your financial problems suddenly vanish.

Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Well, research suggests it probably wouldn’t be as great as you imagine.

And if you ever wondered why you were so wrong about how you’d feel after meeting the love of your life, or why you thought you’d never get over an unfortunate situation, this book: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert will quench your curiosity.

The writer makes a serious argument about why you and I are always making the wrong predictions about what will make us happy and provides insights into the weaknesses and eccentricities of human imagination.

In this blog, I review this incredible book in the following structure:

1. The shortcomings of our imagination
2. The solution to the shortcomings of our imagination
3. Why we reject the solution

Let’s get started.

The shortcomings of our imagination

I will begin with a wonderful quote from this book.

“To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be.” – Daniel Gilbert

The greatest achievement of the human mind is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it’s this ability that allows us to think about the future.

However, as you’re about to find out, our imagination has some serious shortcomings.

Let’s explore.

The filling-in trick

If I asked you to imagine a plate of spaghetti and tell me how much you would enjoy eating it for dinner tomorrow, two things will happen.

Firstly, you will probably imagine this scenario effortlessly without breaking a sweat -because…well…the brain does the heavy construction work of imagining.

Second, notice that the spaghetti you’ve imagined is much richer than the spaghetti I asked you about.

You didn’t even ask about the nuances of eating the spaghetti; is its sauce tomato, cream, or clam?

I’m I eating the spaghetti standing at my kitchen counter, or I’m I at my favorite restaurant?

Instead, your brain behaved like a portrait artist and painted a picture of you eating spaghetti.

When you estimate your enjoyment of this future spaghetti, you respond to this particular mental image as you would respond to a particular memory or perception -as though the detail had been specified by the thing you are imagining rather than fabricated by your brain.

In doing so, you make an error that your future spaghetti self may regret.

The phrase “spaghetti for dinner tomorrow” does not describe an event so much as it describes a family of events, and the particular family that you imagined influenced your predictions about how much you’d enjoy a plate of spaghetti.

Trying to predict how much you’d enjoy a plate of spaghetti without knowing which plate of spaghetti, is like trying to predict how much you’ll pay for a car without knowing which car (Ferrari or Chevy?), or trying to predict how proud you’ll be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment – winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?

Research shows that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, they neglect the fact that their brains perform the filling-in trick as an integral part of the act of imagining.

Here’s another example from the book to help you understand this further.

When your spouse asks you to attend a party next Friday night, your brain instantly manufactures an image of a cocktail party in the penthouse of a downtown hotel with waiters in black tie carrying silver trays of hors d’oeuvres past a slightly bored harpist.

You’ll probably say no to this request without considering the fact that there are many kinds of parties.

For example, birthday celebrations, gallery openings, yacht parties, office parties, and how different your reactions would be to each.

So, you tell your spouse that you’d rather skip the party. But, your spouse naturally drags you along anyhow, and you have a truly marvelous time.

Why? Because the party involved cheap beer and hula hoops rather than classical music and seaweed crackers. It was precisely your style.

And you liked what you predicted you’d hate because your prediction was based on a detailed image that reflected your brain’s best guess, which was in this case -dead wrong.

The point here is that when you imagine the future, you often do so in the blind spot of your mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause you to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences you are attempting to weigh.

The funny thing is: Even if you are now aware that your brain does this filling-in trick, you’ll not help but expect the future to unfold with the details you imagine.

And I don’t blame you.

Because without the filling-in trick, you’d have an empty imagination, and an empty small black hole following you wherever you go.

The leaving-out trick

By far the greatest impediment and aberration of human understanding arises from the fact that…those things which strike the sense outweigh things that, although may be more important, do not strike the sense directly.

Therefore, contemplation ceases with seeing, so much so that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.

Your inattention to absences influences the way you think about the future.

For example, close your eyes now and imagine yourself driving your dream car.

Imagine the curve of the front grille, the slant of the windshield, and the newish smell of the interior.

No matter how long you spend doing this, if I ask you to inspect the mental image you’ve created and read me the numbers on the license plate, you’d be forced to admit that you left out a particular detail.

Just as you tend to treat the details of future events that you imagine as though they were going to happen, you have an equally troubling tendency to treat the details of future events that you don’t imagine as though they were not going to happen.

In other words, you fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but you also fail to consider how much it leaves out.

Here’s an example to illustrate this point.

Let’s say your five-year marriage ends abruptly by the death of your spouse.                                                                                                                                             

I know, I know -this is a gruesome imagery and you’re probably thinking: I’ll be devastated, I’d probably not be able to get out of bed in the morning.

It’s hard to find someone who’d say that in addition to these heartbreaking, morbid images, they also imagine the other things that would inevitably happen in the two years following their spouse’s death.

For example, eating a taffy apple on a warm evening, reading a book, riding a bicycle, going on a first date, or any of the many other activities that you would expect to happen in those two years.

The point here is that the two-year period following a tragic event has to contain something – that is, it must be filled with episodes and occurrences of some kind.

And these episodes and occurrences must have some emotional consequences regardless of whether they are large or small, negative or positive, yet you don’t imagine anything other than the single awful event.

You see…when you imagine the future, a whole lot is missing, and the things that are missing matter. Because -the details you are failing to imagine could drastically alter the conclusions you draw.

Failure to consider what you might not be considering is one of the reasons why you so often mispredict your emotional responses to future events.

Any brain that does the filling-in trick is bound to do the leaving-out trick as well, and thus the futures you imagine contain some details that your brain invented and lack some details that your brain ignored.

The problem isn’t that your brain fills in and leaves out -no, the problem is that it does it so well that you aren’t aware it’s happening.

But if imagination can be so liberal, it can also be too conservative, and that shortcoming has its own story.

Let’s explore…

So far, you’ve seen how your brain makes ample use of the filling-in trick when imagining the future.

The phrase “filling-in” suggests an image of a hole (for example, in a wall or a tooth) being plugged with some sort of material (spackle or silver).

As it turns out, when brains plug holes in their conceptualizations of tomorrow, they tend to use a material called today.

More simply said, you might have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today.

And you might find it particularly difficult to imagine that you’ll ever think, want, or feel differently than you do now.

To put this in perspective for you: teenagers get tattoos because they think “DEATH ROCKS” will always be an appealing motto, new mothers abandon promising law careers because they are convinced that being home with their children will always be a rewarding job, and smokers who have just finished a cigarette are confident for at least five minutes that they can easily quit and that their resolve will not diminish with the nicotine in their bloodstreams.

You might be wondering why this is so. Well…here’s why.

The Reality First policy

Have you noticed that you close your eyes when you want to visualize an object and jam your fingers in your ears when you want to remember the melody of a certain song?

You do these things because your brain must use its visual and auditory cortices to execute acts of visual and auditory imagination, and if these areas are already busy doing their primary jobs -namely, seeing and hearing things in the real world -then they are not available for acts of imagination.

You can not easily imagine a penguin when you are busy inspecting an ostrich because vision is already using the parts of the brain that imagination needs.

Put differently, when you ask your brain to look at a real object and an imaginary object at the same time, your brain typically grants the first request and turns down the second.

The brain considers the perception of reality to be its first and foremost duty, thus your request to borrow the visual cortex for a moment is expressly and summarily denied.

The policy that makes it difficult to imagine penguins when you are looking at ostriches also makes it difficult to imagine wealth when you’re experiencing poverty, affection when you’re experiencing anger, or hunger when you’re feeling full.

You can’t see or feel two things at once, and the brain has strict priorities about what it will see, hear, and feel and what it will ignore.

So, here’s the kicker.

Both the sensory and emotional systems enforce this policy, and yet, you seem to recognize when the sensory systems are turning down imagination’s request but fail to recognize when the emotional system is doing the same.

For example, in one study, researchers telephoned people in different parts of the country and asked them how satisfied they were with their lives.

When people who lived in cities that happened to be having nice weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively happy.

But, when people who lived in cities that happened to be having bad weather that day imagined their lives, they reported that their lives were relatively unhappy.

These people tried to answer the researcher’s question by imagining their lives and then asking themselves how they felt when they did so.

Their brains enforced the Reality First policy and insisted on reacting to real weather instead of imaginary lives.

But apparently, these people didn’t know their brains were doing this and thus they mistook reality-induced feelings for imaginary-induced prefeelings.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.

Vacation? Romance? A night on the town? No, thanks I’ll just sit here in the dark.

Tragic right?

The thing is: you cannot feel good about an imaginary future when you are busy feeling bad about an actual present.

And rather than recognizing this is the inevitable result of the Reality First policy, you mistakenly assume that the future event is the cause of the unhappiness you feel when you think about it.

It’s only natural that you should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes you feel, but because your brain is hell-bent on responding to current events, you mistakenly conclude that you will feel tomorrow as you feel today.

Rationalization

When people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job or a romantic partner; if their candidate losses an important election; fail an interview, or flunk an exam, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.

The fact is negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.

Here’s something to ponder: Able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again.

This is because able-bodied people underestimate how happy disabled people are.

So, if negative events don’t hit us as hard as we expect them to, then why do we expect them to?

Well, the answer is that the human mind tends to exploit ambiguity.

Let me explain.

Objective stimuli in the world create subjective stimuli in the mind, and it’s these subjective stimuli to which people react.

And one of the many things that distinguish us from rats and pigeons is that we respond to the meanings of such stimuli and not the stimuli themselves.

Rather than thinking you’re Panglossian, think of yourself as having a psychological immune system that defends your mind against unhappiness in much the same way that your physical immune system defends your body against illness.

Your physical immune system must strike a balance between two competing needs: the need to recognize and destroy foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and the need to recognize and respect the body’s own cells.

If it’s hypoactive, it fails to defend your body against micro predators and you’re stricken with infections.

On the other hand, if it’s hyperactive, it mistakenly defends your body against itself, and you’re stricken with auto-immune disease.

So, a healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend you well -but not too well.

Similarly, when you face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, and failure, the psychological immune system must not defend you too well (“I’m perfect and everyone is against me.”) and must not fail to defend you (“I’m a loser and I ought to be dead.”)

A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows you to feel good enough to cope with your situation but bad enough to do something about it.

“yeah, that was a lousy performance and I feel crummy about it, but I’ve got enough confidence to give it a second shot.”

You need to be defended -not defenseless or defensive- and thus your mind naturally looks for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably close to the facts.

However, your psychological immune system is only activated when you feel sufficiently unhappy.

For example, when you imagine losing a job, you imagine the painful experience (“the boss marches into his office and shuts the door behind him…”) without also imagining how your psychological immune system will transform its meaning (“I’ll come to realize that this was an opportunity to quit retail sales and follow my true calling as a sculptor.”)

But, it doesn’t do this every time you feel the slightest tingle of sadness, jealousy, anger, or frustration.

It deals with large-scale assaults on your happiness like a failed marriage or a job loss.

So, broken pencils, stubbed toes, and slow elevators don’t pose a grave threat to your psychological well-being and hence do not trigger your psychological defenses.

The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than a very bad experience.

That’s why you might forgive your cheating spouse and take them back, but never forgive them for forgetting your birthday.

Or why you might ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return, the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

The brain and eye are conspirators, and like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of your awareness.

So, because you do not realize that you’ve generated a positive view of your current experience, you do not realize that you’ll do it again in the future.

Not only does this naivete cause you to overestimate the intensity and duration of your distress in the face of future adversity, but it also leads you to take action that may undermine this conspiracy.

The solution: Surrogation

By now you’ve learned how your imagination fails to provide you with accurate previews of your emotional future.

When you imagine your future, you tend to fill in, leave out, and take little account of how differently you’ll think about the future once you get there.

You’ll be heartened to learn that there is a simple method by which anyone can make strikingly accurate predictions about how they’ll feel in the future.

But, you may be disheartened to learn that, by and large, no one wants to use it.

One of the benefits of you being a social and linguistic animal is that you can capitalize on the experiences of others rather than trying to figure everything out for yourself.

Communication is kind of a “vicarious observation” that allows you to learn about the world without ever leaving the comfort of your home.

The fact that you can communicate with others about your experiences should provide a simple solution to the shortcomings of imagination.

You don’t have to imagine what it would feel like to marry a lawyer or move to a different country when there are so many people who have done these things and are all too happy to share their experiences.

If people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about your own emotional future is to find someone who is having the experience you’re contemplating and ask them how they feel.

Since imagination fails us, perhaps we should give up on imagining entirely and use other people as surrogates for our future selves.

Now, I suspect you might be having an objection to this thinking: “I can’t use other people’s experiences as proxies for my own because those people are not me.

And therefore I’m better off basing my predictions on my somewhat fickle imagination than on the reports of other people whose preferences, tastes, and emotional proclivities are so radically different from my own.

But the research shows that when people are deprived of the information that imagination requires, they are forced to use others as surrogates, and when they do, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings.

This suggests that the best way to predict your feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.

Why we reject the solution

If you’re like most people, then like most people you don’t know you’re like most people.

Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see him or herself as average.

Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having a better football sense than their teammates.

This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others -as unique.

So, what makes us think we are so darned special? Well, three things:

First, even if we aren’t special, the way we know ourselves is. We are the only people in the world whom we can know from the inside.

We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must infer that other people are experiencing theirs.

Because we know ourselves and others by such different means, we gather very different kinds and amounts of information.

In every waking moment, we monitor the steady stream of thoughts and feelings that run through our heads, but we only monitor other people’s words and deeds, and only when they are in our company.

The second reason is that we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special.

Most of us want to fit in well with our peers, but not too well. We prize our unique identities, and research shows that when people are made to feel too similar to others, their moods quickly sour and they try to distance and distinguish themselves in a variety of ways.

If you’ve ever shown up at a party and found someone else wearing the same dress or necktie as you, then you know how unsettling it is to share a room with an unwanted twin whose presence temporarily diminishes your sense of individuality.

The third reason why we tend to overestimate our uniqueness is that we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness -that is, we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they are.

Individual similarities are vast, but we don’t care much about them because they don’t help us do what we are here on earth to do, namely, distinguish Jack from Jill, and Jill from Jennifer.

As such, these individual similarities are an inconspicuous backdrop against which a small number of relatively minor individual differences stand out in bold relief.

Because we spend so much time searching for, attending to, thinking about, and remembering these differences, we tend to overestimate their magnitude and frequency, and thus end up thinking of people as more varied than they actually are.

Our belief in the variedness of others and uniqueness of self is especially powerful when it comes to emotion.

Because we can feel our own emotions but must infer the emotions of others by watching their faces and listening to their voices, we often have the impression that others don’t experience the same intensity of emotion as we do.

This is why we expect others to recognize our feelings even when we can’t recognize theirs.

Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates.

After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe people’s emotional reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than it actually is.

Conclusion

Nature has given us a gift that no other life form has: the ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen to enable us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without taking them.

And yet, as impressive as this ability is, it is by no means perfect. As you’ve seen, when we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will.

When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions -but, because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.

Since I’ve just talked about a few big ideas from the book, I recommend you read it in its entirety.

It is quite witty, enjoyable, and informative. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it too.

Dr. Daniel Gilbert did an incredible job.