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The Focusing Illusion

Why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness

For instance, people might believe that moving to a sunny place like California will make them happier, but they tend to overestimate the impact this change will have on their well-being (Schkade and Kahneman, 1998). A hedonic system that maximally motivates Alice during her internship would be such that her expected subjective satisfaction discriminates strongly between the income levels associated with the different positions. Evolution’s likely solution to this incentive problem has been to make us naive by design, believing that happiness lies just beyond the next achievement, even as the goalposts keep moving ahead whenever we succeed.

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