"It worked last time"

You've got a strong reply to all of this, which is your own memory. The move did work. The first months in the new place were the best you'd felt in years, and you can remember the feeling. So whatever the research says about averages, your experience says a next thing can lift the hum, because one did.

It did. The season is real, I said so in chapter 2, and I'm not going to take it back. The question is what happened after it. Maike Luhmann, Wilhelm Hofmann, Michael Eid and Richard Lucas gathered every longitudinal study they could find on how well-being changes after big life events, 188 publications and nearly sixty-six thousand people, covering marriage, divorce, bereavement, the birth of a child, unemployment, getting a job again, retirement and moving. Two things came out. Different events have different effects, and how good an event is supposed to be turned out to be a poor guide to what it did. And the effects on how people rated their lives were stronger and more consistent than the effects on how they felt day to day.

Read that second finding alongside the last chapter. The events changed the rating, the outline, more reliably than they changed the days. The days are where the hum lives.

The single clearest study of the season and the wearing off is one of marriage. Richard Lucas, Andrew Clark, Yannis Georgellis and Ed Diener followed more than twenty-four thousand people in Germany for fifteen years, through weddings and everything after. On average, people reacted to marriage with a rise in life satisfaction and then adapted back towards where they'd been. The average, though, hid a lot. Some people rose and stayed up for years. Some people went the other way. I'll come back to those differences in chapter 13, because they're the most hopeful part of the research. But the average is the honest answer to "it worked last time". It did work, and then, for most people, it wore off, and the wearing off is the ordinary course of events rather than a sign that you chose the wrong thing.

A new coat is warm and it's also new, and for the first fortnight you notice it every time you put it on. By spring it's your coat. It's exactly as warm as it was, and you don't notice it at all.

That's the season. The next thing keeps whatever real warmth it has. What wears off is the noticing, and the noticing was the part that felt like the hum going. If you want the next thing to keep working the way it did in the first month, chapter 19 is about the two things the research suggests slow the wearing off. Neither of them is getting another one.