Arrival Fallacy: An Illusion of Happiness

This line of thinking often emerges when you’re pursuing a significant goal. All your energy is fixated on reaching the finish line, whether it’s a metaphorical one like securing a promotion, graduating, or mastering a Lizzo tune on your guitar, or a literal one like preparing for your first 5K run.

Advertisement

You invest all your hopes and dreams in reaching that destination, and you do!

But then what?

That’s when a tinge of disappointment can creep in. Because the truth is, you remain the same person you were before crossing the finish line, despite adding another achievement to your repertoire. What you believed would transform you may leave you feeling hollow.


This sensation has a name—the “arrival fallacy.”

According to Tal Ben-Shahar, an expert in positive psychology who coined the term, the arrival fallacy is the illusion that attaining our goals or reaching our desired outcomes will bring us lasting happiness.

“The arrival fallacy is this illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness.” – Tal Ben-Shahar

Arrival Fallacy: A Flawed Concept

Not surprisingly, this concept is flawed. A recent study revealed that people who fixate on their happiness levels, engrossed in thoughts like “I’ll be happy when…,” tend to be less happy overall.

Certainly, setting meaningful goals and challenging oneself is important, but it should only be a part of the happiness equation, not the entirety of it.

Breaking Free From Arrival Fallacy

Instead of believing that everlasting happiness lies just beyond the finish line of your chosen goal, what if we considered that we already possess much of what we need to be happy right now?

Here’s how you can break free from the arrival fallacy and recognize the goodness within your grasp while you’re still in control, rather than waiting for some distant arrival.

Establish Happiness Milestones Along the way

This doesn’t have to be as formal as it sounds.

Let’s take training for a race as an example. Suppose you aim to achieve a specific time in a 5K race scheduled a few months from now. Focusing on your time goal is beneficial—it helps you stay committed to your training and find purpose, especially on challenging mornings plagued by rain or sleep deprivation.

You persevere. Race day arrives.

Now, what if you don’t meet your goal? What if you experience a stomach cramp, encounter thunder and lightning, oversleep, or stumble 35 seconds short of your target?

READ RELATED: Drug Overdose: How To Trace Symptoms Of A Severe Overdose?

You’ll undoubtedly feel disappointed. That’s perfectly understandable.

But if you think about it rationally, does it make sense to completely discount all the hard work you put in to make it to the starting line?

You learn from the ups and downs that occur throughout the training process. If you base your worth exclusively on the final event, you may neglect the growth that has occurred.

Questions to ask Yourself to Achieve the Happiness Milestone

So, on the path to achieving any significant goal, ask yourself these questions as happiness milestones:

• 
  
  How is this process benefiting me?
• What am I gaining?
• What brings me joy at this moment?

Ease into Living and Embracing the Present

Given our fast-paced lives and tight schedules, a baseline level of anxiety, stress, and unhappiness has become the new normal. You may not realize it, but this tendency to get dragged into the past and future can leave you exhausted and out of touch with yourself.

The remedy for this disease is something that many people have been preaching for a long time: conscious awareness and a dedication to living in the “now.” Living in the present moment solves a problem you may not have realized you had.

Continue Setting Goals

The arrival fallacy is more likely to appear when you’ve “arrived” and realize that you may still carry the same stress or pressure you had before.

This can occur when you sacrifice one aspect of your life, such as friendships, relationships, work, or leisure, to achieve an extraordinary goal in another area.

According to Tal Ben-Shahar, the solution is to set more goals.

Yes, you read that right. Go ahead, be ambitious. If you consistently challenge yourself, even with attainable micro-goals, you’ll be less susceptible to that hollow feeling of “What do I do now?”

There’s no need to fixate solely on arriving, and that is the real secret to happiness.

Reference :

1. The Arrival Fallacy for Physicians – (https:physiciansanonymous.org/arrival-fallacy/)

Source: Medindia