"The house will fix it"

The house is the next thing you can see most clearly, and the property site is designed to make sure of that. Three bedrooms. The garden. The kitchen that opens onto it. And the belief behind the search is that the hum is, at least partly, a fact about square footage.

I have less research for this one than for the others, and I'll say so plainly. The Luhmann meta-analysis included relocation among its eight events, and found that events differ in their effects and that how desirable an event is supposed to be doesn't predict what it does. I couldn't get hold of a good study that follows people through a move to a better house and measures their life satisfaction afterwards, and I'm not going to invent one. So what follows is reasoning, using the findings from earlier chapters.

Start with Schkade and Kahneman. What made the students in the Midwest expect Californians to be happier was the climate, which is the feature of California that's easiest to see from Ohio. The house is the same. What you can see from the sofa is the kitchen and the garden, the features that differ most from the flat you're in, and the focusing illusion says those features will get far more weight in your forecast than they'll have in your living. A garden on a Thursday in November is a wet rectangle you can see from the kitchen. The kitchen on a Thursday is where you make the same dinner while thinking about the same email.

Then apply the chapter 6 test. If the flat has a cause in it, the damp, the noise, the third flight of stairs with a pushchair, the forty-minute commute that the new place would cut to ten, then the move removes a cause and it's a fix. Note that every one of those is a specific Thursday-afternoon fact. Now look at your saved search and ask what it's actually filtering for. If the filters are bedrooms and a garden and the feeling of a bigger life, the move is a hope, and the hope is being asked to lift a hum that was there in the last flat too.

The commute is the one to watch, because it cuts both ways. A move that adds twenty minutes each way in exchange for the spare room adds a cause to your Thursday to buy a feature for your outline. I'd guess, and it's a guess, that a fair number of the people on the coast who seem calmer are calmer because they stopped commuting, not because they can see the sea, and the sea is what you notice when you visit.

None of this says don't move. It says the listings are showing you the outline, and your job before you do anything is to write the Thursday. Chapter 18 has the question.