What it does to the things you get

There's one more cost, and it's the strangest, because it falls on the next thing itself. The belief that a change will fix the hum makes the change worse at being what it is.

Think about what the hope asks of the new house. It asks it to be a house, which it can manage, and it asks it to end a discontent that has survived three flats and two jobs, which it can't. So the house arrives with a task it will fail at, and when the season wears off, as chapter 7 says it does for most people, the failure gets charged to the house. The kitchen didn't do it. The garden didn't do it. And now the reader is living in a house that has, in a quiet way, let them down, and the next search starts with a grievance against the place they're in.

A guest who arrives to a house tidied for someone else is welcomed and also, faintly, a disappointment. The house wasn't for them. That's what the next thing walks into.

Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky tested a model of exactly how the gains from a good change get eroded, following 481 students for three months after a positive change in their lives. Their model has two routes for the erosion. The first is that the good feelings the change produces simply decline over time, the season ending. The second is that aspirations rise. Having got the thing, the person now wants more of it, or the next one, and the gap between what they have and what they want reopens from the wanting side. Both routes were supported by their data.

That second route is the hope at work. The bigger the expectation loaded onto the next thing, the further aspirations have to climb to keep up with it, and the faster the gap reopens. My reading, and it is mine, is that the size of the hope shortens the season. A house chosen as a fix, for the shorter commute, does what it was chosen to do, and the commute stays short, and the house is judged on that and passes. A house chosen as a hope is judged on the hum, and fails within the year, and gets blamed.

The same is true of jobs and partners and towns. A person chosen because they're kind and you like their company can keep being kind. A person chosen to end a flatness that was yours before you met them will be found, in about eighteen months, to have failed at it, and it won't have been their job. The hope doesn't just fail to get what it wants. It spoils what it gets.

There's a good half to this. The same study found two things that slow the erosion, and both are in your hands rather than in the next thing's. That's chapter 19. First, the question.