The Arrival Fallacy is Blocking Your Happiness

The arrival fallacy is blocking your happiness.

You were twelve and couldn’t wait to be sixteen and in high school. You were sixteen and couldn’t wait to be nineteen in college, finally out on your own. You were 19 and couldn’t wait to be 21. Graduated, first drink in hand, the unguided adult responsibilities hit you and you wondered why you ever romanticized being a young adult. You realize adults aren’t the sage, all-knowing, self-actualized you thought they were as a child, the aging of everyone around you frightens you. Bearing the burdens of adulthood, unfiltered realities of the world, you desperately clasp onto emblems of teenagehood while time passes faster each year. A year was once a fifth of your life, a tenth, now it’s only a 20th. You want to shake teenage you, and tell them they’re wishing the present away.

You violently swim against the current, delaying joy until you reach an ever shifting shore—a forever-moving goalpost. “When I get perfect grades I’ll be happy. When I buy my most coveted status symbol item I’ll be happy. When I get into a prestigious college I’ll be happy. When I get a post-grad job I’ll be happy. When I move to a different city I’ll be happy. When I get my dream job I’ll be happy. When I meet someone I’ll be happy. When I get a promotion I’ll be happy.” We live our lives measuring ourselves through checklists, debasing our human experience into one of an inanimate object going through a factory trying to quality assure ourselves as worthy. Entire lives are easily wasted away postponing happiness to a time after some arbitrary worldly goal is achieved. The achievements come, but with diminishing marginal satisfaction each time. Even the law of diminishing marginal utility of income suggests that as income increases beyond a certain threshold, the extra benefit decreases.

This is common of those who might have grown up on academic validation. Those who never rest, even when they lay still — stirring, thoughts racing, adding to a never ending checklist of arbitrary goals that will really fill the void this time. No, really. 

Peace, meaning, and joy aren’t a place, status symbol, vocation, escapist vice, dopamine chase, or coveted material item away. Peace is a mentality, it is full assurance in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you’re left feeling empty no matter what, it’s because the treasures of this earth will never fill the void that only the peace Christ has blessed us with can. As the preacher wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:2-11, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.”

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. (John 14:27)

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:19-21)

The arrival fallacy is an illusion that once we make it, we will achieve true happiness, according to psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar, who coined the term. It’s why even very successful people might struggle with mental health issues, before making it they lived with hope of “making it” being the key to happiness. But after “making it” they find that that wasn’t the solution.

Achievement is not happiness. Life is what happens while you’re waiting for your “real life” to start. Living in the past or future robs your every day. You hold great light inside you, have inherent worth and are always becoming. Live in the moment, one day you’ll look back and realize how truly great those moments were. Engulf yourself in the present, cherish the journey, center yourself around what matters — not checklists or objects— the breath of life all around you. 

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” (Jeremiah 29:11)