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4 Things Everyone Says Will Make You Happy…But Probably Won’t
How Your Unconscious Expectations and a Little-Known Phenomenon Called Hedonic Adaptation Can Make You Miserable, Even When You Get Exactly What You Want
Close your eyes and imagine your ideal future. You can have anything you want, whatever would make you happy. What’s different? What do you have then that you don’t have now?
I bet I can guess — you’re married to the perfect person, you have beautiful, healthy, well-adjusted children, you have your dream career and you make just the right amount of money.
You don’t have those things now.
You might be saying to yourself, either consciously or unconsciously, that when you get those things, then you’ll be happy, but chances are, you won’t. Oh, maybe you will for a while but then the happiness will fade.
When it does, you’ll realize that your expectations were flawed. Without realizing it, when we say then I’ll be happy, we expect to be happy ever after. We expect to possess happiness, to arrive at happiness. Happiness will be ours and we won’t have to search for it anymore.
It’s this flawed expectation and a little-known phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation, the…
