Why You Feel So Unsettled When Your Big Dream Comes True
It comes down to how you manage your expectations
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“If I could publish just one book, I’ll die happy.”
This was my mantra for most of my adult life, and a good part of my adolescence, too. It’s what kept me going through years of rejection, failure, and those dark stretches when I considered throwing in the towel on the whole writing dream. Your “if” might be different: If I could just make partner by the time I’m 30. If I could just get tenure. If I could just get my business back in the black.
Whatever dream you’re holding dear, I bet you really, truly think you’ll be happy once you achieve it. But I can almost promise you that, unless you know how to ride the waves of expectation, you will not.
There’s a sort of emotional whiplash that happens when your big dream comes true.
Why? Because there’s a sort of emotional whiplash that happens when your big dream comes true. You believed that the thing you wanted was going to satisfy you completely, or solve your problems, or make you truly happy. When it doesn’t, the resulting sense of loss can send you grasping for something else to fill the void. But then that thing doesn’t live up to your expectations, either, and the cycle continues. The positive psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar named this feeling “arrival fallacy.”
Think of your dream like a really delicious-looking slice of cake. You see it sitting out there on the counter, and you’re craving it, hard. You become consumed with how eating that cake will make you feel. You expect it will satisfy literal hunger, yes, but you also like that you’re being a bit deviant. Screw the diet; you’re a grown human. You can eat cake for breakfast if you want to. You grab a fork and dig in.
But after three bites, you’re already thinking about the latte you want with it. Or how you wish you had more money to buy cake on the regular. Or maybe it’s too sweet, too rich, and not at all what you thought it would be. The cake, as it turns out, didn’t satisfy. Marie Antoinette learned that lesson the hard way.
Getting that job you were angling for, or that contract, or that promotion, can…
