The Arrival Fallacy: Why We Should Decouple Our Happiness From Our Goals

Her story certainly isn’t unusual. Students preparing for their exams think, If I pass, life will be rosy. Company workers think, If I get transferred, everything will go well. But even when those wishes are fulfilled, in many cases nothing about their situations changes at all.

We live in a goal-oriented culture and we receive encouragement to identify goals, write them down, and work towards them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, except that we can quickly find ourselves attached to the goals themselves, which are nearly always outcomes. And outcomes, in most cases, are uncontrollable. Finding a job, losing we

Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness. The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. I’ve slipped into this trap so many times I’ve lost count. For years, happiness was always somethi

We commonly spend our lives focused on the future: usually this carrot dangles before us in the form of a career ladder. It is easy to follow the carrot and harder to think about what might truly make us happy. We follow the former, not realising that we will never reach it to savour it, or that even if we do, we might find that particular carrot i

We may progress, but we feel like we’re constantly failing. And so instead of inspiring audacious next steps, our goals spark anxiety (What if I don’t succeed?), apathy (Why care when the journey ahead is all mapped out already?), and anger (Why am I forced to play this game?).