Have you ever finally achieved something you wanted for years… only to feel less happy than you expected?

In this short article, I’ll show you what research can teach us about the pursuit of happiness, and how we can make better predictions about what will actually make us happy ( without a crystal ball).

A universal fantasy is to know the future. Not just what will happen to us… but how happy it will make us.

Should you move to that country?

Give a chance to this person you met?

We make some of our biggest life decisions based on how we predict future events will make us feel. Researchers find that we are quite bad at this affective forecasting, we tend to overestimate how intensely, and for how long, future events will affect our emotions, something called the impact bias [see reference list for studies on the impact bias and a nuanced review of its magnitude 1–4].

Why do humans tend to exhibit the impact bias? Partly because when we imagine the future, we zoom in on the event itself: The promotion, the rejection, the move to a new country…

But we forget something incredibly important: life keeps happening around the event.

Your brain adapts and habituates, new routines appear, other emotions enter the picture, attention shifts.

So how can you better predict your future?

Don’t build your entire happiness around one future event. Don’t just imagine the peak moment of getting the dream job. Visualise the life that keeps happening around that milestone or change. Imagine the ordinary Tuesday that comes after: The workload, your sleep, your stress levels, your relationships, your daily routine once the novelty fades.

Humans are often much better at predicting momentary excitement than long-term day-to-day wellbeing. Studies even find that people who win the lottery can return close to their previous levels of happiness after a few years. Likewise, people experiencing major setbacks often recover emotionally much faster than they predicted [5–8].

Research [9] on what predicts life-satisfaction shows happiness is shaped more by everyday experience than major milestones. We overestimate  big achievements, status shifts, purchases, and underestimate relationships, mental health, sense of purpose, emotional resilience and management.

So if like me you're guilty of always chasing the next goal, don't lose that ambition, do your best to achieve it, but don’t postpone happiness entirely until that next milestone.

Happiness rarely comes from one single source, nurture a balanced life.

 

References

 

1.       Ayton, P., Pott, A. & Elwakili, N. Affective forecasting: Why can’t people predict their emotions? Think. Reason. 13, 62–80 (2007).

2.       Levine, L. J., Lench, H. C., Kaplan, R. L. & Safer, M. A. Like Schrödinger’s cat, the impact bias is both dead and alive: Reply to Wilson and Gilbert (2013). J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 105, 749–756 (2013).

3.       Gilbert, D. T. & Wilson, T. D. Prospection: Experiencing the Future. Science (1979). 317, 1351–1354 (2007).

4.       Wilson, T. D. & Gilbert, D. T. Affective Forecasting. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 14, 131–134 (2005).

5.       Brickman, P., Coates, D. & Janoff-Bulman, R. Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 36, 917–927 (1978).

6.       Kuhn, P., Kooreman, P., Soetevent, A. & Kapteyn, A. The Effects of Lottery Prizes on Winners and Their Neighbors: Evidence from the Dutch Postcode Lottery. American Economic Review 101, 2226–2247 (2011).

7.       Clark, A. E. & Georgellis, Y. Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the British Household Panel Survey. Economica 80, 496–512 (2013).

8.       Kahneman, D. & Deaton, A. High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 16489–16493 (2010).

9.       Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M. The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. (Simon and Schuster, 2023).