Happiness And Hindsight Book Report

Happiness and hindsight are two pieces of the same puzzle, that is true for just about anyone as it was mentioned time and time again in Stumbling on Happiness, a book that was really great at pointing out the obvious. When reading a book that takes its title from an accident and then proceeds to remind me that everything I perceive can be one giant lie because of falsified memory and a twisted sense of protection, “[one] does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.” At first I found a hard time trying to understand a connection between the two reading assignments, because as I had always understood the story of Sisyphus it was truly a tragedy that had no hope to be found except for the schadenfreude of not being the man himself. Albert Camus always has been a monolithic figure for me because he is the founding philosopher of the school of thought for absurdism. Which helps put not just his own short rambling interpretation of Sisyphus into context, but also helped give a little more psychological weight to the ideas shared by Mr. Gilbert.
Absurdism is based around the conflict of …show more content…
They are inseparable.” By adjusting for time, perception, memory and even our own definition of happiness we can find that joy in the absurdity of life, becomes the “absurd hero” like Sisyphus and find solace in purpose. Dan Gilbert wants us to also remember Sisyphus, because “the least likely experience is often the most likely memory.” If Sisyphus is our model, then he never remembers his own torture because he is human, and humans are dreamers whether we want to be or not. We protect ourselves from our past, present and our future, doing incredible mental gymnastics in an effort to maintain happiness, what a truly absurd