How to Not Get Caught in the Trap of the Arrival Fallacy

I once heard a comedian talk about what it was like to be diagnosed with a terminal illness. The only thing he wanted to do before he passed away was to perform his comedic act on a popular late-night TV show. With so little time left to live, he set a goal to reach his dream within a year. He practiced and practiced his routine but, unfortunately, didn’t succeed. Fortunately, he also didn’t pass away. He recovered perfectly. Therefore, he kept the same goal but now gave himself five years. On the fifth year, he did it. He was on one of the most popular late-night shows in the world and performed his act in front of millions. It was everything he’d ever wanted. When he went back to his hotel room that night, he sat down on his hotel bed, all alone, and cried himself to sleep.

What this comedian experienced is a phenomenon called the arrival fallacy. It’s an extremely common thought process that humans trap themselves in where we romanticize the greatness of an event, a relationship, or a material accessory and promise ourselves that once it is acquired, we will also acquire a sense of lasting happiness. What usually happens instead is the exact opposite.

Because of this trap, many people get particularly sad on birthdays and holidays. People feel empty during these days because of their expectation that somehow it will be full of majesty and glory. Instead, they are confronted with the harsh truth that the day didn’t do anything spectacular at all. For those of you battling mental health challenges, this trap is even worse because, in the absence of happiness, the mind tricks you into thinking that not being happy is the same as sadness, and then you convince yourself you are sad.

Once this happens, it progresses further. With all your sadness, you get more upset by thinking you must be so broken since being with your wonderful family on Thanksgiving should give you so much joy but, instead, you’re such a ruined soul and life is terrible and you’re a mess and nothing will ever save you because your life is in ruins. All of this happens while you’re sitting at the table having a perfectly nice dinner, and if only you could let go of your expectations for the way something should be, it would be amazing.

It’s amazing how much we love thinking that we’re logical, rational, and intelligent animals. We’re not. We’re a complete mess and believe imagined scenarios in our head all the time. These imaginations can be about the future and even manipulations of the past, and we tend to get so upset over them that our reactions can often lead to complete self-destruction.

Not only is this absolute madness, but we are all very aware of how poor our future-telling skills are and how many times we’ve predicted something that didn’t even come close to happening. Despite this, the very next time we bust out our God-awful prophecy skills and predict certain doom, we still believe in the accuracy of our imagination and freak out. Then, after we’ve properly panicked the crap out of ourselves, we blame the world for being so cruel. But the world’s just sitting there like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and has nothing to do with anything.

We even glorify our pain and humblebrag by saying things like, “I’m so broken, not even Thanksgiving with family can make me happy!” But that’s true for everyone. No Thanksgiving with family can make anyone happy. Happiness can only come from within. Unfortunately, creating expectations puts such a burden on things to perform that it’s likely no performance would be good enough anyway.

This is also why when people get married or have children as a way to save their relationship, it’s almost a guaranteed disaster. The sooner you can accept that events, relationships, and things cannot save you, the better. This is also why suicide prevention research is struggling to find promising results. No event, relationship, or accessory can contain happiness and, therefore, no event, relationship, or accessory can contain sadness either. All the research in the world to find either will never get anywhere. The real culprit in charge of making us experience these emotions is our own thinking.

Please remember that it’s not the world that has made you depressed, it is the way you interpret the world. That doesn’t mean you won’t experience terrible tragedies. Everyone does that. But the more you recognize these cognitive traps, the more you can realize that you are, in fact, not broken, nor do you need fixing. Your mind simply loves tricking you into interpreting things specifically for the purposes of making you miserable.

Fortunately, once a magician’s secrets are revealed, they no longer have power over you. That’s why some religions of the world call the mind the deceiver or trickster. The mind is very cunning and can easily ensnare you with its lies. Shining your light of awareness onto the mind’s mischievousness is a big step towards overcoming it, and if you want to achieve peace of mind, it requires vigilance to be cautious of your own thoughts and to not believe everything you think.

This does not mean you shouldn’t have goals. Have all the goals you want, but don’t expect great feelings from them. While you’re at it, love with all your heart, but don’t make a business deal out of it and expect love back. It’s all too easy to hold yourself back and put up walls to defend yourself. That’s what everyone is doing and that’s also why everyone is suffering. We are constantly faced with the challenge of doing what is right instead of what is easy. This is not just about our interactions with the world, but our interactions with ourselves.

In this life, do as many great things as you can. But if you do something great, like perform on a late-night show, and you get sad because of it, it’s not because you are broken, it’s because you are human, and looking for pain in unexpected places is exactly what the human mind loves to do.

So, next time your mind tries to convince you of impending doom or guaranteed bliss, remember that your future telling skills are just as bad as everyone else’s. People have been trying to figure out that Rubik’s cube since before Egyptians were building pyramids and, despite all their efforts, nothing has really changed. Who knows what will happen next? Happiness will come on its own as long as you don’t beg for it and, when it needs a break, it will leave. The same goes for sadness as long as you don’t resist it. Instead of overthinking either situation, simply be like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and watch your life unfold like a miracle in the wind.