Friend, have you ever been through this? You set your heart on something and spend your days picturing how wonderful life will be once it happens. Whether it is winning over the man (or woman) of your dreams, landing the job you have always wanted, or buying a flat, these goals that once seemed forever out of reach are finally yours after relentless, hard-won effort! In the moment you reach them, you feel a rush of excitement and let out a sigh of relief. And yet, once the goal is met, there is no "Happy ever after" the way you imagined. You say to yourself: "So that's all it was — turns out it's nothing much after all." And so you start chasing the next goal, and round it goes again.
If this is your experience, you are far from alone. Psychological research (Gilbert et al., 1998; Kahneman and Thaler, 2006) has found that people consistently and substantially overestimate the intensity or duration of the pleasure any event will bring — and the same goes for sorrow. In short, the thing you long for may not lift you to bliss, and the thing you dread most will not condemn you to misery. Why is this so? Possibly because such a tendency carries an evolutionary advantage. Any species that thrives does so by gathering large amounts of resources, chiefly food and mates. If a species, once satisfied, ceased to want or strive for anything more, its competitive edge would surely fall short of other species. By the same logic, if a single disaster crushed a species' will and killed off its drive to keep going, it would be only natural for that species to be eliminated. It is worth noting that a thriving species is not the same as a happy individual. Take pigs, whose numbers far happier outnumber dogs, having achieved on an evolutionary level the goal of replicating the species' genes again and again. But ask yourself: would you rather be a pig or a dog? The answer is surely obvious. Humans may not be as wretched as pigs, yet when it comes to the workings of our emotions we too are often under evolution's curse — hard to satisfy, and forever busy with the next pursuit, for instance.
Fortunately, what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to break free of our fate. It seems the way out lies in learning to "live in the present" and valuing the journey over the outcome. Life is but a journey. No one was ever told what life was supposed to be before being born into the world, and yet we call it a journey all the same. Seen that way, everything falls into place more easily: along the way, we would do well to find good companions and savour the scenery of every passing moment.
Image source: Caregiver Warrior
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(3), 617.
Kahneman, D., & Thaler, R. H. (2006). Anomalies: Utility maximization and experienced utility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(1), 221-234.
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