"I'd be happy if only"

The if-only is a small sentence and it carries most of the weight. "I'd be happy if only I had a garden." "I'd be fine if only I wasn't doing this job." It sounds like a description of your situation. It's actually a forecast, and forecasts about how a different life would feel are a thing psychologists have tested, because they turn out to be wrong in a particular way.

David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman asked large numbers of students in the American Midwest and in Southern California two kinds of question. They asked them to rate their own satisfaction with life, and they asked them to rate how satisfied someone similar to themselves would be who lived in the other region. The students in the two regions were equally satisfied with their lives. But when asked about the other region, people in both places expected Californians to be happier than Midwesterners. When the researchers looked at why, the answer was the weather. Climate was rated as much more important for someone living somewhere else than for the person doing the rating about their own life.

Their name for this was the focusing illusion. When you think about a different life, you think about the things that are easy to see and different from yours, the sunshine, the garden, the job title, and those things get far more weight in the forecast than they'll have in the living. On a Thursday afternoon in California, the sunshine is just the weather. The person under it is thinking about their work and their family and whether they've replied to that email, the same as the person in the Midwest under a grey sky. The climate is real and the difference in satisfaction is nothing.

That's the if-only. It takes the one feature of the next thing that's most visible from here, the one that's most different from the life in hand, and makes the forecast out of that feature alone. The garden is what you can see from the sofa. Thursday afternoon in the garden, with the same job and the same tiredness and the same hum, is what you can't.

You may know this error from the other direction. An earlier book in this series, The good old days had problems too, is about the same forecast pointed backwards, where a past that's easy to see in outline gets rated as happier than it was. The next thing is the same trick played forwards, and it's worth noticing that the mind that does it is yours in both cases. What you can do about it is the subject of chapter 18. The short version is that the if-only needs to be forced to describe a whole Thursday, not a feature.