See if any of this seems familiar to you. You finally hit a new milestone, like a new personal best lap time, or finally advanced from HPDE2 to HPDE3, or scored your first podium or — even better — your first win, and it feels good in the moment, but it doesn’t feel like you thought it would. The feeling doesn’t last as long as you would have thought or wanted.
Instead, what you thought would bring you happiness only subsides to leave you wanting for what comes next. It’s certainly something that rings true in my ears. Whenever I had those moments, I always wondered why they did not feel as good for as long as I thought they should have.
The phenomenon extends from the race track to every aspect of life. Whether it’s getting a promotion, or earning an advanced degree or any milestone we believe will lead to lasting joy, it seldom seems to live up to what we imagined it would be, and I always wondered why. You probably have, too. It turns out the condition has a name and raft of academic study behind it.
It’s called “arrival fallacy,” a term coined by psychologist Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught at Harvard and Columbia universities, and now teaches at Centenary University.
Dr. Ben-Shahar came up with the idea based on his experience as an elite squash player. When he won the Israeli national championship, he thought the happiness would be enduring, but it didn’t last.
As you work toward a goal, your brain is flooded with dopamine in anticipation of reaching it. When the novelty wears off, or the joy doesn’t last as long or feel as good as we thought it would, that particular phenomenon within arrival fallacy is called “hedonic adaption.” As a result, the achievement doesn’t provide the happiness we expected, and something that we thought would bring us joy might leave us feeling empty or lost.
This is where you can begin to see how enough never seems to be enough for billionaires, or why celebrities and rock stars who have it all are still woefully unhappy. My heart bleeds for them.
In HPDE, Time Trial and racing, if you are not aware of the theory or don’t know that it’s lying in wait, it can lead to frustration, which is the antithesis of why we embarked on track life in the first place. You are always left wondering why things aren’t as fulfilling as you thought they would be. But you are human. Arrival fallacy is inevitable, and everyone goes through it. So what can we do to mitigate it?
First, we recognize that the act of “arriving” is a fallacy, just as the name implies. We have a lifetime of cognitive habit to clean up here, but if we understand what is coming when we hit a milestone, maybe we won’t place so much emphasis and meaning on it. We need not look to the goal as the source of happiness, but rather look to the process, the pursuit of that goal, as the main driver of our well-being.
“Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable,” said Dr. Ben-Shahar. “Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”
Think of it this way. If you are climbing Mount Everest, you have to remember it takes at least two months to do it. It takes nearly two weeks to hike to base camp, then two weeks adjusting to the altitude before you can even think about attempting the summit.
Then, when the weather is good enough to make the climb, you climb for four days, camp overnight three times, and the final ascent to the summit takes nine to 12 hours. You only have a few minutes at the summit before you have to descend within the weather window.
That’s two months of hard labor for two minutes at the summit. You better have gotten something out of the climb. That about sums up arrival fallacy. Long story longer, avoiding the pitfalls of arrival fallacy means making it about the climb, not about the summit.
In NASA HPDE, Time Trial and racing, the joy we get from it lies in the process, and sharing it with the people in our NASA family. The new techniques we learn, those “aha moments,” a particularly good dice with a racing buddy, or a thousandths-of-a-second win in Time Trial. That’s where satisfaction comes from. The good news is we get those moments every time we head out from grid. We get to “arrive” every day we are at the track doing what we love.
What an excellent read! Bravo!