Can someone explain to me, psychological illusion known as the Arrival Fallacy?
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So, the arrival fallacy is the phenomenon when we believe that achieving a long-term goal will make us happy, only to find that after a short period of time that happiness wears off, often leading to us feeling _worse_ than before.
The why of this is still being understood, but it seems to be a combination of a few factors:
– The path to a long term goal has many incremental checkpoints along the way, all of which give us positive reinforcement along the way. We are reinforcement-craving machines, so we like the little positive nudges. When we hit the big goal, we get a big shot of reinforcement at the end, but then nothing after that. This abrupt end of the reinforcement cycle can lead us to feeling worse.
– Humans are very good at adapting to their current situation – if we have a big advance or setback in life, our brains recalibrate after a time and set that as our new “baseline” for happiness. This was a good thing, evolutionarily speaking, as it kept us moving forward to new goals when we were successful and kept us from being too depressed when we failed (so we could set new goals). When you arrive at your goal, your brain resets that as the new normal, and you stop feeling happy about the achievement to motivate you to go achieve something else.
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