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The Arrival Fallacy: A Psychologist Explains Why Reaching Your Goals Won't Make You Happy
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The arrival fallacy
It's our false belief that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness.
It’s the strong belief that when you accomplish something great, you’ll finally be happy.
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Pursuing goals isn’t a problem
It becomes dangerous when you focus on attaining them for your happiness in life.
Goal attainment is, at most, equally, if not less important than the progress towards the goal.
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Achievement doesn’t equal happiness
Achieving a goal usually reveals another, even more, challenging goal. This may bring in much more work because the pursuit of goals never ends.
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“Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving: the only destination is the journey.”
The School of Life
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Focus on the process
Take pleasure in the progression towards goal achievement.
When you focus on the process and enjoy it, you take pleasure from the atmosphere of growth.
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Ben-Shahar
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Hedonic adaptation
We adapt fast to changes in our lives. This trait is beneficial to us when through hard times or adapting to new surroundings, but it also means that when we achieve something that should bring gre...
50-10-40% formula
Only 10% of our happiness is determined by our circumstances, while 40% of our happiness is determined by our everyday thoughts and behavior and 50% of our happiness is genetically determined. So, if being happy once we achieve that major milestone only accounts for 10% of happiness, thinking you’ll be happy when you achieve that big goal just isn’t going to cut it.
Doses of happiness in everyday life
Building your happiness muscle means finding happiness in your daily life:
- Take pauses to enjoy the small pleasures in life;
- Be generous;
- Practice gratitude;
- Get more exercise;
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Key Ideas
Hedonic adaptation
It explains our tendency as human beings to chase happiness, only to return back to our original emotional baseline after getting what we want.
We run on a hedonic treadmill...
Tal Ben-Shahar
"Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak."
Cultivate More Happiness
- Find your right fit or match, both personally and professionally.
- Appreciating life’s small moments.
- Smile more, even if you don’t feel like it.
- Perform random acts of kindness.
- Spend money on experiences versus things.
- Avoid comparisons.
- Build and maintain close relationships.
- Make little changes in your daily routine: getting more sleep, exercising, getting out into nature, and meditating.
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The Elusive Butterfly Called Happiness
- Happiness is an enigma, an elusive butterfly. Different people experience this fleeting feeling in diverse ways.
- The extrovert personality types have a stronger, more positiv...
Don't Chase Happiness
Understandably, pain, pleasure, and loneliness can make us unhappy, and pleasures can provide us with momentary happiness.
A certain dissatisfaction, want and frustration, is, strangely enough, providing a background towards being happy. Fulfillment of all desires, and having nothing to pursue, paradoxically makes us unhappy.
It can be said that happiness is intended pleasure, and absence of pain, but if we are trying too hard to be happy, we cease to be so.
You Cannot Bottle Happiness
All of us, no matter what is our state of affairs, experience dissatisfaction, frustration and other unpleasant emotions. These emotions are as essential as one's feeling of euphoria when good things happen.
Happiness is a journey, a never-ending quest, which cannot be simply captured, bought or sold.