DISSATISFACTION GUARANTEED

From a founding father of behavioral economics comes a pathbreaking book that recasts the role negative emotions play in our lives and shows why the constant search for happiness clashes with human nature.

In the 1980s, George Loewenstein co-founded a new science called behavioral economics. His research and that of his colleagues and collaborators such as Richard Thaler (co-author of Nudge) and Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow) led to a revolution in understanding, predicting and, where possible, compensating for the many limitations of the human mind. Loewenstein's central contribution to the field has been his research on emotions the way our feelings radically influence our choices and make us strangers to ourselves. Now, in a major new book Loewenstein takes on happiness and the powerful negative emotions that keep us from achieving it. Defying the happiness industry, Loewenstein argues that evolution has actually designed us to experience negative emotions more often and more powerfully than positive ones. The upshot is that those of us who fail to find and sustain happiness are not unlucky or flawed but merely human. The very feelings that burden us are the same ones that helped our species adapt and survive. This knowledge comes not as a bitter pill but as much-needed solace for everyone struggling through the myriad frustrations and heartbreaks of modern life. In this fascinating deconstruction of negative emotions and their behavioral consequences, Loewenstein explains how features of our mind -like memory, attention, and self-esteem- conspire to keep us down. He reveals the downside of supposedly uplifting feelings, such as hope (which prolongs our suffering in hopeless situations) and happiness (which works like an addictive drug). And he untangles misery's intertwined forms, from boredom and loneliness to jealousy and regret. A striking contrast to many self-help books written by behavioral scientists, Dissatisfaction Guaranteed makes a sobering but ultimately comforting argument: the sooner we understand our negative natures, the better off we might be. The first part of the book explains how different features of our mind conspire to make us miserable. The second part of the book examines specific forms of misery and the connections between them. I organize the chapters from bad to worse, based on responses from my Misery Survey. As the book progresses, we descend from miseries that we may hardly think about to those that seem to torture us most of all. George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. The sixth most highly-cited living economist in the world, he co-founded the field of behavioral economics in the 1980s, and was one of the main proponents of the "nudge" school of public policy (although lately he has been among its most prominent critics). He grew up in the Boston suburbs and received his PhD from Yale University. His mother, the psychologist Sophie Freud (1924-2022), was a granddaughter of Sigmund Freud who spent part of her notable career critiquing her grandfather's work, especially as it pertained to women. Loewenstein continued the family tradition of intergenerational debate by engaging in many spirited arguments with his mother about the finer points of psychology. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Donna Harsch, a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon.