Here's Why You Struggle to Predict What Will Make You Happy
Will a big house or a prestigious job title bring lasting happiness?
Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge.
-Lao Tzu
Humans have long been obsessed with predicting the future.
It’s not hard to understand why. If you had the power to predict what will happen in the stock market. technological advances or future weather patterns, you could be the richest and most powerful person to ever live.
But predicting the future—especially anything past the next few days— is a fool's game.
Along with the weather and the stock market, people often make (wrong) assumptions about what will make them happy in the future.
This is a problem because achieving most goals in life requires two finite resources: time and money. A surefire way to live a life riddled with regret is to exhaust your time and money to achieve a goal, only to find out it wasn’t actually what you wanted.
People spend their entire life savings and wait years to buy “their dream house” only to discover that after a few months, the extra square footage and the beautifully renovated kitchen don't make them feel happier or fulfilled.
Other people dedicate their lives to their careers, working countless late hours to get the promotion and the corner office, only to find out that the fancy new title didn’t mean as much to them as they imagined it would.
In this post, I’ll dig into the research on why most people are bad at predicting what will make them happy.
Affective forecasting: The messy art of predicting your future feelings
A 2005 paper provides an extensive overview of the concept of affective forecasting, the term used when people predict what will make them happy in the future.1
As the researchers point out, accurate predictions about what events or circumstances will make you happy in the future require you to correctly forecast three things:
Will achieving a particular outcome make you happy?
How much happier will it make you?
How long will that happiness last?
If you can predict these three variables, you’ll know which goals are worth pursuing.
Let’s have a look at what the research says about our ability to predict these three variables.
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Most people are pretty good at predicting what will make them happy in the short term
People are quite good at predicting whether certain choices and outcomes will make them feel good or not.
On any particular night, people can accurately predict whether they would be happier going to a movie theater or watching Netflix at home or whether they would be happier ordering pasta or sushi at dinner.
This is the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to affective forecasting. Our lives would be quite stressful if every minor decision in life bogged us down with uncertainty, worry, and analysis paralysis.
As the researchers point out, it’s important to predict not only whether a certain outcome is desirable but also to be able to predict the specific emotions we will feel.2
It’s not enough to know whether you will feel positive or negative about an event; you need to be able to articulate how you will feel. Will you feel excited, sad, angry, disappointed, afraid, or some combination of emotions?
Again, the research indicates that people are generally good at predicting their emotional state for a given outcome.
Most people would accurately predict that donating their time or money to a children's hospital would leave them feeling some combination of hope and pride for having helped someone in need.
However, the further in the future an event is, the less accurate we are at predicting how that event will make us feel.
A 2002 research paper asked participants to describe what a good day would look like tomorrow and 1 year from now.3 When asked to describe their day tomorrow, participants were more detailed and balanced in their forecasting, detailing events that will happen throughout the day that will be positive and negative. When asked to describe a good day a year from now, their description became broader and less nuanced; things will be good, but they can’t really explain why.
This is important to understand when making plans that won’t come to fruition for many years down the line. It’s kind of insane to think that we ask 19-year-old college students to choose an academic major that will influence how they spend 40 hours of their week when they are 35 years old.
Yes, you are good at science, and like the idea of helping sick people, so you pursue a career as a doctor. To become a doctor, you must invest 8+ years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get through undergrad and medical school. By the time you finish your residency, you’re likely north of 30 years old, and maybe the day-to-day reality of being a doctor does not feel at all like you imagined it would a decade ago.
People overestimate how much happier they will be
It’s one thing to be able to predict how achieving a certain goal might feel, it’s quite another thing to predict the intensity of your feelings in the future.
People might rightfully predict that buying their “dream home” will them feel good. They may also be able to predict the specific emotions they would feel such as pride and excitement. What we struggle with is predicting how much happier we will be if we move from a “Starter home” to our “dream home.” Research has shown that most people overestimate how much happier buying that dream home would make them.
People underestimate how fleeting happiness can be
The final variable you need to consider when forecasting if achieving a goal will make you happy is how long your increased happiness will last.
The research suggests that people often underestimate how quickly they will return to a baseline level of happiness after achieving a major goal or life event.
Returning to our example of buying your dream home. You might think that achieving this goal will permanently double your current level of happiness. In reality, you might feel an increased spike in happiness once you move into your dream home, but the intensity of that happiness will be less than you expected, and it won’t be long before your increased happiness diminishes. Eventually, you’ll probably be similarly as happy in the dream home as you were in the starter home—But with a much higher cost of living.
Researchers refer to our inability to accurately forecast how long life events will impact our happiness as “hedonic adaptation.” Here’s a quote from chapter four of the book “The Stability Of Happiness” that perfectly describes how hedonic adoption works.4
Hedonic adaptation refers to the notion that after positive (or negative) events (i.e., something good or bad happening to someone), and a subsequent increase in positive (or negative) feelings, people return to a relatively stable, baseline level of affect.
For example, events such as reaching an athletic goal, or attending a meeting of a weight-loss support group, may elicit feelings such as joy and hopefulness, respectively. However, the thrill of an athletic achievement and initial hopefulness tend to abate over time.
Returning to our example of buying that dream house, hedonic adaption explains why that very expensive decision is unlikely to bring you lasting happiness; eventually, you simply adapt and get used to living in a bigger house. When you first move into a bigger house, you’ll compare the new house to your old one, and that will make you feel good. But, since living in that house is something you experience every day, the novelty of more square feet begins to fade, and your brain stops thinking of your dream house in relation to your old house, and that jolt of happiness begins to diminish.
What does not diminish is the bigger mortgage, property tax, insurance, utility, and maintenance bills that come with a bigger house. Excitement fades, but housing costs are forever.
This is not to say that buying a bigger home is always a bad idea. This does suggest that it may not be the solution to happiness you hope it is and highlights the need to fully think through these types of decisions that have an enormous impact on your financial life.
This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x
Liberman, N. (2002). The effect of temporal distance on level of mental construal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-1031(02)00013-6
Armenta, C., Bao, K. J., Lyubomirsky, S., & Sheldon, K. M. (2014, January 1). Chapter 4 - Is Lasting Change Possible? Lessons from the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model (K. M. Sheldon & R. E. Lucas, Eds.). ScienceDirect; Academic Press. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124114784000047
Nice column showing how we most likely have a baseline of happiness. Typo on first sentence of the third paragraph from the bottom should be UNlikely to bring you lasting happiness. Thanks