The Arrival Fallacy

The Arrival Fallacy is a false belief that reaching a valued destination can sustain happiness. It’s why our outcome and goal-oriented societies can never make us happy. We continue to think that if we attain just this one thing then we’ll be secure and happy for the rest of our lives.

Then when we fall back down to our baseline level of happiness we just imagine that we were craving the wrong things and that we should look elsewhere. We never step back enough to consider that maybe the entire game we’re playing is wrong and that we’re living in this illusion that pursuing goals will make us happy.

I’ve fallen into this trap with other more subtle goals. Like myself, many others have turned to philosophy, art, beauty, and the more abstract things that claim to satisfy the soul and give us the truth, but even these will never be enough. It doesn’t matter how lofty our ambitions are when we reach the destination, the arrival fallacy will take place. We’ll fall back down to our baseline level of happiness as in the term Hedonic Adaptation.

Another trap that we fall into pertaining to the Arrival Fallacy is the trap of thinking that other people are secure and happy and that they’re somehow different. That once we achieve what they’ve achieved then we’ll be happy and fulfilled. But even the CEO’s in the mansions are still worrying and have very similar if not worse inner lives than we do. Material possessions don’t change anything on the inside.

How we can approach this instead isn’t to find a certain practice and maintain perfect mental clarity through practices like meditation, but instead to come to terms with this and realize that certain anxieties will always be with us and to be a little less resistant toward them. The goal isn’t to banish our worries and anxieties but to view them in a playful manner and laugh because we know they’ll always be a part of our lives in some way.

There is no final destination, life is like music and the greatest wisdom is realizing that there is no great wisdom and truth that will fix all our problems, but that it’s about the journey and living one day at a time.