## Metadata - Author: [[The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish]] - Full Title: #139 Laurie Santos — the Pursuit of Happiness - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/71d78afe-b389-4888-897a-44c0afc7d939 ## Highlights - The Arrival Fallacy: Why We Never Seem to Be Happy When We Achieve Something Key takeaways: - People who are constantly seeking happiness in the future rather than embracing the present moment are referred to as 'happy if' or 'happy when' people. - The arrival fallacy, also known as the happily ever after fallacy, is a bias where one believes that they will be happy when a specific event or achievement occurs. - Affective forecasting refers to the errors in predicting the intensity and duration of future happiness. - Obtaining desired outcomes may bring some level of happiness, but it is often not as intense or long-lasting as anticipated. Transcript: Speaker 2 So the way that I think of people like this, I call them happy if or happy when people, because they're not happy in the moment. They're happy when something, when I get a promotion, when I get a relationship, when I get a new car, when I get a new house, I'll be happy then. And then why is it that we never seem to be happy when that happens? Yeah, well, this is a bias that researchers call the arrival fallacy. It's really like the happily ever after fallacy. Like, when this happens, I'll be happy. Speaker 1 And, you know, it's not like we're mis-predicting. You know, you get a new house and, like, yeah, that feels good, but it doesn't feel as good as you're going to think. And it doesn't feel good for as long as you're going to think. These are errors in what we call affective forecasting. You're forecasting that you're going to be way happier, but we're off about the intensity. It's not as good as we predict, usually. And we're off about the duration. It doesn't feel good for as long as we tend to predict. ([Time 0:06:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f6eb7e3c-542a-4dc2-a3ea-f66eca98e8c7)) - Tags: [[logicalfallacies]] ## New highlights added September 26, 2023 at 4:21 AM - Episode AI notes 1. The arrival fallacy, also known as the happily ever after fallacy, is a bias where one believes that they will be happy when a specific event or achievement occurs. 2. People who constantly seek happiness in the future rather than embracing the present moment are referred to as 'happy if' or 'happy when' people. 3. Affective forecasting refers to the errors in predicting the intensity and duration of future happiness. 4. Obtaining desired outcomes may bring some level of happiness, but it is often not as intense or long-lasting as anticipated. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/b4fe605a-3dd4-4177-9e23-5df1638d921f))