"This one will be different"

Look at the list you made in chapter 1. If it has three next things on it, then three times you have believed that this particular change was the answer, and three times, if you're honest about the year-later column, the hum turned up again attached to something else. That's not a character flaw. It's a pattern, and the striking thing about it is that it doesn't feel like a pattern from the inside. Each next thing arrives as a fresh case. The house was a mistake because of the commute, but the next house won't have that commute. The job was wrong because of the manager, but the new job has a different manager. Every time, the thing that went wrong was specific and the thing that's coming is specific in a different way, so the pattern never gets to show itself.

The research on job changes has a name for this. Wendy Boswell, John Boudreau and Jan Tichy followed a sample of managers and measured their job satisfaction before, during and after voluntary job changes. What they found was low satisfaction before the move, a rise immediately after it, and then a decline. They called it the honeymoon-hangover effect, and their point was that the whole sequence could be seen within the same people. It wasn't that some people were happy in new jobs and others weren't. The same person went up and then came down.

Adrian Chadi and Clemens Hetschko found the same shape in German panel data, in a paper whose title is "The magic of the new". Workers who chose to change employer reported unusually high job satisfaction afterwards, and the authors' phrase for how long it lasted was "in the short term only". They then looked at people whose job change was forced by their workplace closing, and for those people the new job brought no rise at all. The rise belonged to the choosing, not to the job.

Sit with that for a moment, because it's the most useful finding in this book. The season isn't a property of the next thing. It's a property of having chosen and got something. That's why each one feels different from the inside and comes out the same. The new house isn't the same as the old house. The feeling of having got the new house is exactly the same as the feeling of having got the old one, and it wears off on the same schedule.

So the honest answer to "this one will be different" is that the thing will be different and the season will be the same. Whether the hum comes back depends on something else, which is whether the thing removed a cause. Chapter 18 is about how to tell. For now, go back to your list and look at the year-later column again. If the hum came back all three times, the fourth next thing needs a better reason than being the fourth.