"Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert (2006)

Reported experiments measure happiness according to subjects' instantaneous satisfaction. An alternative---and possibly more appropriate---measure of happiness is satisfaction with the narrative of one's past, a sense of accomplishment. This alternative is likely to be correlated with instantaneous satisfaction (e.g., because instantaneous satisfaction helps focus on long-term goals, or reflects the anticipation of future satisfaction with past accomplishments), but is distinct.

The challenge in psychology is to distinguish a bug from a feature. For instance, is assessing one's life according to the quality of its story---as opposed to accumulated instantaneous satisfaction---a bug or a feature? The book offers limited framework for drawing this distinction, at the individual and societal levels. Instead, the book lists bugs, governed by ancient gods (e.g., the "psychological immune system"), introduced as mnemonics, not scientific explanations. The author's fascination with human propensity to err (i.e., to make inconsistent choices) borders on misanthropy.

The prose is consistently clear, if verbose and occasionally (infrequently but irresponsibly) pandering to the aficionados of bathroom references. To assume that a reader savouring bathroom humour prefers it to other modes of discourse is akin to assuming that a beggar wears torn shoes in order to let his feet breathe.

A psychological experiment can make the same point as a novel would---but succinctly. Where philosophy used to reign, psychology and, more recently, neuroscience have taken over.