The Arrival Fallacy — Getting There Won’t Fix You

You think you'll be happy when you arrive?

Well, I've arrived at a few places, and I'm here to save you the trip.

My friend, welcome aboard to The Daily Podcast.

My name's Jonathan Doyle, I'm glad you're here.

Today we're gonna talk about the arrival fallacy.

The arrival fallacy is simply the idea that on that magical day when you get

to your goal, when you suddenly run that marathon, buy that house, buy your first

Ferrari, your kids all go off perfectly into the perfect careers, whenever you

finally get to the summit of whatever mountain you have constructed as the il-

idealized goal infrastructure of your life, what the research tells us is that

you're gonna run into a bit of a problem, and it's called the arrival fallacy.

This has been worked on by psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, and

he named it the arrival fallacy.

He's the person who actually came up with the terminology.

And basically, it's the belief that reaching the particular goal that

you're chasing, the, the number in the bank account, the, the job

title, crossing the finish line, will deliver us lasting fulfillment That

when we do that thing, we're going to experience pretty much close to,

uh, what, what would you call it?

Cosmic enlightenment, complete sublime bliss.

Now, we don't think this way, but I think we tend to live this way.

It's why the lottery still exists.

It's like this belief that I'm gonna one day win.

The minute I win that, my entire life is gonna radically change, and everything

is going to be utterly perfect.

But what we discover is that when we actually get to the particular goals

that we're chasing, neurologically, your brain resets to a baseline

and quietly nominates a new summit.

So let me take you through some of what this could look like.

Uh, we talk about something called hedonic adaptation.

Hedonic, you might be familiar with the word hedonism, like

the indulgence of pleasure.

Hedonic adaptation is that we get used to attaining certain

things, and I was thinking about this coming into the studio.

Let's just say that for the first time ever, you get a car that has leather

seats, and you're like, "Oh, this is the greatest thing ever." And for like

30 seconds, a day, a week, a month, you're like thinking to yourself,

"I've got a car with leather seats.

This is the greatest thing ever." Now, in the late, sort of early 21st

century, lots of people have cars with leather seats or, you know, pretend

leather seats, so I, I know this doesn't sound particularly remarkable.

But all of a sudden you realize that your leather seats don't actually

have heating built into them.

So you're like, "Oh, what do I have to do to get heated leather

seats?" This is hedonic adaptation.

So we have something good, and we enjoy it for a short space of time,

but automatically our brains go to work on what would be slightly better.

What would just be a little nicer than what I currently have?

You know, you get one house and you're happy there for a long time, but

then you go, "You know, I wonder if I could get a slightly bigger one."

It's like that story in the Bible where there's that rich man who, you know,

decides that he's gonna tear down his barns and build bigger ones because he's,

uh, he needs more room for all his stuff, and then tragically he dies that night.

And even there, that parable is sort of saying, it's that old saying of where

your treasure is, you know, where, that's where your heart's gonna be.

That we chase after certain things, but when we actually get

there, sometimes we find that they're not as life transformative

as we thought they might be.

So what do you do?

Do you simply give up?

Do you just decide that there is essentially no point to anything?

That's nihilism.

You look at some of the existentious, existentialist literature of the late

19th century and early 20th century.

Look at people like Albert Camus, kind of this sense of

what's the point of anything?

What is-- Why, why do anything?

If we're gonna reach goals and they don't really satisfy, what do we do?

And, you know, do you see this sometimes with professional, uh, athletes?

You see it with some Hollywood stars.

They sort of seem to have absolutely everything, but

their lives go off the rails.

So I guess I would suggest that there's a bunch of reasons for this.

One of them is that in Latin there's this term capax Dei,

which means capacity for God.

So I'd always argue that we are, metaphysically we're spiritual beings,

and we're designed for profound spiritual and relational connection.

So essentially a lo- what we, if we place our entire hope on attaining

goals in this reality, there seems to be a lot of proof in human history

that doesn't quite fill the bucket.

C.S. Lewis, the brilliant, uh, British writer, famously said, and this is an

exact quote, he said, uh, "If I find in myself desires that nothing in this world

can satisfy, then I can only assume that I was not made for here." There's a great

song written about that by, uh, Brooke, used to be Brooke Fraser, now Brooke

Ligertwood, wrote a great song about that.

But isn't that a great line?

"If I find in myself desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, then

I must assume that I wasn't made for here." So it's interesting, isn't it?

That, that human history and our own experience tends to show us that nothing

here seems to totally satisfy us.

That even when we reach our goals, it's not enough, and we pretty quickly

begin to go, "What's the next thing?"

And I've said this before on podcasts, there is plenty of research that

shows that money, up to a certain point, does increase happiness.

We should say that, because it's true.

If you're living in terrible poverty and you can't send your kids to

school and there's not enough food on the table, if we add more

money to that, you do get happier.

And then, but if you look at the data, it goes up to a certain

point and then it basically stops.

It just doesn't keep going.

The graph does not keep going up when they do these deep studies on

people's, uh, subjective happiness.

Because of course, you know, if it was true that just adding more money to

your life made you exponentially happier indefinitely, then it would follow

that billionaires, of course, would be the happiest people in the world.

And maybe some of them are probably very happy, but we can probably agree

that there's plenty of extremely wealthy people who are not happy.

So this all brings us to the one great question.

It's like you're listening going, "Jonathan, okay, we get it, that

you're telling us that the research shows that if we eventually reach

our goals, we kinda get bored and we look for hedonic adaption."

So what do we actually do?

So the answer to this is not actually lowering your ambition.

For me, that would be the nihilist approach.

What's the point?

Doesn't matter.

Nothing really satisfies, so let's just all just sit around and why

expend any energy doing anything?

The actual secret to this is relocating the payoff.

Relocating the payoff.

From where?

From the destination into the actual process itself.

So let me open this up for you I'm a huge believer in the character ethic,

the virtue ethic, which is, it's Aristotelian, so it's kind of based in

Aristotle, uh, Aristotelian philosophy.

So, you know, fifth, uh, uh, 500 years before, um, the birth of Jesus, so

we're talking 500 BC, ancient Greece.

We've got that Mediterranean explosion in philosophy, and we have someone

like Aristotle arguing that the human person is the kind of thing

designed to seek perfection in a way.

The Greeks had a different term for it.

It was eudaimonia.

It was this idea that all of us carry within us this sort of blueprint for our

own excellence, and that we can become somebody remarkable through our choices.

So even in early classical philosophy, they were sort of saying that, look, the

point of it all isn't attaining stuff.

The point of it all is the becoming, is who you're becoming in the process.

Are you becoming the fullest version of who you could become in this life?

So, you know, now we use that rather, I don't know how to describe it, that

rather banal language of, you know, living y- your-- being your best

self, your best version of yourself.

Um, the Greeks would not probably use that language.

They would say that there is one single optimized perfection that you

could be If you lived the absolute fullness of your potential, and

you do that through your choices.

So what this means is, in classical philosophy, the becoming was the

thing, it was the doing, it was who you became in the process of attaining,

uh, important things in life, and it was kind of like the, the process

was the reward itself, and the goal, if you reached it, was just icing.

The real magic, the real purpose of action, was to become the most perfected

version of yourself that you could.

So I guess the idea is to begin to realize as early as possible

in life that goals matter.

They're, they're useful because they calibrate us, and they give us clear

things to orient our action towards.

But if we make the goal the point, if we attain the thing, then we find that

when we get there, it doesn't quite do what we thought it was gonna do.

So I'm trying to draw your attention to the possibility that it's actually who

you become in the process that is just as important as the actual attainment.

So back in COVID, I used to run, uh, one half, uh, two half marathons a

week and one full marathon a week.

So Tuesday, Thursday, I would run a half marathon, and then Sundays I'd

run a full marathon, sometimes further.

And I remember the first time I ever went out and just ran an Olympic

distance marathon on my own, and when I broke-- when I crossed that sort of…

I'm looking at my watch as I'm running, and I crossed that

42.2-kilometer mark, I'm like, "Oh, wow." I'm like, "That's hectic.

I just, like, knocked off my first marathon.

There, there's no crowd, there's no audience.

There's no one.

It's just me out in the middle of nowhere." And it was cool. It was

a cool feeling. It was like, "Oh.

Oh yeah, I've done that.

I've… Yeah, cool." And then what happened was the real magic was who

I became in those months and years of running ultra-distance, that I just got

sort of tougher, and I could endure more, and I just kinda liked that I could do it.

So my character changed just from daily doing these difficult, hard things.

See what I'm saying?

That the goal was cool, it was great, but it was the process of who I became

along the way that was really magical.

So just a reminder that I think we live in a culture that is just so

truly obsessed with certain goals that we're all supposed to want to attain.

In my country at the moment, there's a, there's a huge obsession with home

ownership, and let me be clear about that, like, home ownership is a good thing.

It's a good thing not to have a huge mortgage, and it's a good thing not

to, you know, to have some stability, and these are really good things,

so let me be clear about that.

But I was listening to a politician the other day, and I thought, just this, this

kind of like, it's like a magical spell.

It's like it's all they talk about, home ownership, the dream, the, the

Australian dream of home ownership.

I'm going, "Yeah, I get it," but at the same time I thought, "This is like

setting up a culture that this is the point of life." That if, that if you do

this, then your life will make sense.

That if you own a home, you will… So can, can you balance this with me?

'Cause I'm not saying it's, it's not a good thing.

It is a good thing.

But when you absolutize it, when you go that the most important thing in our

society isn't personal virtue or civic virtue or how productive the society

is or how safe or virtuous it is, the most important thing is that every

single one of us must achieve this goal and dream, and then you'll be happy.

And again, we know that's not true.

We, we know there's plenty of people that don't own houses and, you

know, quite enjoy their lives and can be, you know, really satisfied.

So I'm just asking you to question some of the cultural narratives.

You know, when I make a million dollars, when I graduate university, when I marry

the perfect person, then I'll be happy.

You know, none of us have married the perfect person.

We've all married another human, and we're human, and we're all gonna

have great times in relationships and challenging seasons in relationships.

So what I'm really trying to sell you on in this episode is simply the idea that

more important than any cultural enforced goal or more important than your own

goals that are meaningful to you, is not so much their attainment, but who you

become in the process Because it's the daily craft, the person you're becoming in

the pursuit that really, really matters.

So at the moment I'm, uh… You know, I remember the first time

that I did a, I did a keynote for, you know, more than 10,000 people,

and I've got another one coming up.

Now, the first time I did it, it was epic.

It was, like, such a great life experience, and I got another one

coming up in a few months, and I'm like, it- it's not the same feeling.

It's like I wanna go there and give 100% and serve as many people as

possible and give them a life-changing experience because that is appropriate.

That's the f- that's the right thing to do.

That's the thing that will help me grow and, and learn things and

practice things and bring my best.

But I'm not looking to that experience to somehow be another magical moment

that perfects my life and solves all my problems, because I know it isn't.

And it's a great experience.

I'm very grateful for it.

But it's who I become in the weeks leading up to it, in the work, in

the effort, in the processes that lead to operating at that level.

So that'll do it for today.

Just to put that idea deeply into your mind, that if you're going

through your life right now chasing specific goals, can I say two things?

One, keep going.

This is not a podcast saying your goals are meaningless.

These are-- This is a podcast saying your goals are just as meaningful as ever.

But I wanna add a layer to this for you, that even more important than

attainment of those goals is the man or woman of character and discipline

and effort and self-sacrifice that you're becoming in the process.

And to loop back again to that sort of classical philosophy lens, this

is the real purpose of the journey.

It's the becoming.

It's that we're given this one precious life, and that through our

choices and actions, and this was the heart of kind of what we would got

maybe call a teleological philosophy.

Teleology is just the belief that everything has its vector, has

its, has its potential, has the thing that it's supposed to become.

You know, so an acorn's teleology is to become an oak tree.

So what is the teleology?

What is the purpose of a human person?

It's to become more fully human And to cooperate with the divine

in the pursuit of becoming all that it can be for the glory of God.

Amen.

That's what is the game for me.

It's like, can I get to the finish line of my life having actualized, brought into

reality all of my potential, my potential for service, kindness, decency, honesty,

care, courage, you know, do-- all those crucial character traits that, that, uh…

I was listening to a podcast this morning.

I was out running at 5:00 a.m. and there was this very, you know, very,

two very influential podcasters globally just talking about the scale of lies in

the world and how the entire political class is just, and a lot of our

institutions are just soaking in lies.

It's like the actual native tongue of our political and civic

system at the moment, tragically.

So even just to become a person of honesty in your life project

is like a profound achievement.

And we do these things through our daily individual choices.

That's where the magic is.

I keep teaching this to people.

Do not expect some radical single moment of your life when you will

make the perfect choice and suddenly you'll become radically different.

It is in the tiniest daily choices that make the profound difference.

All right, I'm gonna stop there.

Uh, please come and say g'day on Instagram, JDoyleSpeaks.

You can find me on YouTube, JonathanDoyleSpeaks, and on the

website, jonathandoyle.co, dot C-O.

And, uh, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with people.

But let's finish with this final thought for the day.

My friend, keep building, but just stop outsourcing your happiness

to a finish line that keeps moving