The term arrival fallacy is useful —
Happiness Myth No. 8: You’ll Be Happy As Soon As You…
We often imagine that we’ll be happy as soon as we get a job/make partner/get tenure/get married/get that promotion/have a baby/move. As a writer, I often find myself imagining some happy future: “Once I sell this proposal…” or “Once this book comes out…”
In his book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy.
I'd heard the term a few times and it seemed true enough, but I never applied really applied it practically.
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High standards are a gift that can easily lead to some downsides.
Even on a daily level, if I had anything short of an exceptional day, I'd feel bad at the end of the day.
That would be fine if it helped me produce more without longer-term repercussions — I'd take the downside of feeling bad if it let me get more done.
But, counterintuitively, it didn't seem to help. Anything short of starting the day sprinting out of the day was a candidate for a day to go more off the rails.
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I thought about it, and I realized I was taking it all really seriously. I would say to myself in the mornings "okay, I'm going to do a bunch of important things today, and do them quickly and well" — if it worked, I only felt neutral. (It was supposed to happen.) If it didn't, I felt bad.
Rubin says the exact thing —
The arrival fallacy is a fallacy because arriving rarely makes you as happy as you expect.
Why? Because usually by the time you’ve arrived at your destination, you’re expecting to reach it, so it has already been incorporated into your happiness. You quickly become adjusted to the new state of affairs. And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals a new goal. There’s another hill to climb.
In fact, working toward a goal can be a more powerful source of happiness than hitting it – which can sometimes be a letdown. It’s important, therefore, to look for happiness in the present, in the atmosphere of growth afforded by making gradual progress toward a goal (technical name: pre-goal attainment positive affect).
For my part, a seemingly stupid and small change made quite a difference.
On the my checklist of what I do for my morning routine, I added a little entry that says "No arrival."
So it's like... make bed, check... stretch, check... brush teeth, check... and on down the list. The last one, now, is "No Arrival."
And then I just think for a minute that, yes, I'm going to aim to do a lot of things today, and I might succeed or not, but I'm going to have a good time in the process.
It takes about 5 to 10 seconds. It's led to a lot more positive affect and, perhaps counterintuitively, a lot more getting done.