Affective Forecasting

You know exactly how happy the promotion will make you, and for how long. You are wrong on both counts — and this has been measured, many times.

Here is why, from first principles. When you imagine the future, you build it out of one detail — the new title, the bigger house, the finished marathon — and leave out the thousand other details of an ordinary day. But the future, when it arrives, is made of ordinary days. The commute still commutes. The dishes remain.

So good events lift us less, and bad events crush us less, than we predicted. We are durable creatures forecasting as if we were fragile, and fragile creatures forecasting as if we were glass.

Use this gently. Fear the future less; most blows are survived and absorbed. And chase the grand prize with a quieter expectation — the joy is in the ordinary day either way, so you may as well improve that.