The Arrival Fallacy

“When I be that, I will be happy”

I recently graduated and attained my post graduate degree - a beautiful masters in Industrial/Organizational psychology. Kudos and pats on my back and endless gratitude for everyone that touched my life during this era ??. The perseverance, good luck, and sheer grit it takes to do a masters program in another continent shouldn’t ever by understated. This is obviously cause for celebration and fun and the perfect opportunity to scream LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL! And oh the good times are rolling ??

Amidst all the happiness, there’s a hidden part of me that’s afraid. Afraid that my best time is behind me and afraid that somehow my happiness will stop here till I find another purpose now. How irrational, I know right! You and I all know that the amazing part about graduating is that the possibilities of going uphill from here are endless! So I gave this hidden part of me permission to come out of hiding. I did some research and armed myself with information. I found this concept by Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychology expert, called ‘the arrival fallacy’ which is an illusion that once we make it to a goal or reach our destination, we reach happiness. And we’ve gotto keep reaching these goals to keep finding happiness! Now as a radical optimist on most days, I find this idea ridiculous. Good news is, as the coined term suggests, it’s a ‘fallacy’ - it’s hardly true. I don’t want to wait for achievements to come along and bring my happiness; achieving is a lifestyle, not pizza delivery which I’m going to wait for to make me happy!

I want to be clear - I’m all for tunnel-vision-focus goals, achievements, and celebrations. In addition, I want us to think about also being big on ?enjoying the process? to these goals. As my new favourite author James Clear has said in ‘Atomic Habits’, we don’t always rise to the level of our goals, but fall to the level of our systems - the systems being our processes and daily lifestyle actions to get to that goal.

So going forward, I promise myself to become more immersed (flow state) in my daily habits and actions, romanticizing the mundane, and making more normal mediocre moments feel celebratory. As fun as the feeling of having “arrived” is, i remind myself just how much fun I had through the journey - so much so that it’s been one big ongoing celebration and I see no reason to let the ‘arrival fallacy’ stop me now!

For more reading on this concept, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/smarter-living/you-accomplished-something-great-so-now-what.html .