The Milestone That Felt Empty: When Achievement Fails

You worked towards it for years. You reached it. And then, alongside whatever genuine satisfaction arrived, there was something else: a quiet flatness, an “is this it?” you had not expected and felt faintly ashamed of.

An earlier version of this article explained that feeling with two confident research claims and opened with two citations that connected to nothing around them. The research is more interesting than the confident version, mostly because the researchers disagree with each other.

What Was Claimed, and What Is Actually Disputed

An earlier version of this article said: “Psychologists have a name for the belief that reaching a specific goal will produce lasting happiness: the arrival fallacy. The research is consistent: we systematically overestimate the emotional impact of future positive events.”

Two problems. “Arrival fallacy” is a popular phrase rather than a research term; the research terms are impact bias and durability bias. And the research is not consistent. It is an open argument conducted in print.

The original finding, attributed to Gilbert and colleagues in 1998, defines the impact bias as “the tendency to overestimate the emotional impact of a future event, whether in terms of intensity or duration”, with the durability bias as “the tendency to overestimate the length of time future emotional responses will last”.

Then Levine, Lench, Kaplan and Safer published a challenge in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012. Their result: “participants accurately predicted the intensity of their feelings about events. They overestimated only when asked to predict how they would feel in general and later report their feelings without reference to the focal event.” Most participants, they found, “misinterpreted requests to predict their feelings in general as asking how they would feel when they were thinking about the focal event”, and clarifying the question “significantly reduced overestimation”. Their conclusion: “people have more sophisticated self-knowledge than is commonly portrayed in the affective forecasting literature.”

Wilson and Gilbert replied in 2013 under the title “The Impact Bias Is Alive and Well”, arguing that Levine and colleagues “failed to review or include in their meta-analysis many studies that directly contradict their claim”, “used a faulty classification scheme”, collapsed conditions designed to produce opposing effects, and “miscoded some of the studies they did include”.

So the honest summary is narrow. Both sides accept that people overestimate how long a feeling will last. What is contested is whether the initial intensity is overestimated at all, and whether part of the effect came from the way the questions were asked.

Which still covers the experience this article is about, because the flatness after a milestone is a claim about duration. The feeling arrived and then went, sooner than expected.

The Treadmill Metaphor Has Been Revised

An earlier version also said the hedonic treadmill adapts to new baselines quickly, and that yesterday’s extraordinary becomes today’s ordinary “within months”. No source gives that timeframe, and the model itself has been substantially revised.

Diener, Lucas and Scollon reviewed the adaptation literature in American Psychologist in 2006 and concluded that people “are not hedonically neutral and individuals have different set points that are at least partially heritable”, that someone “may have more than one happiness set point”, that “the happiness set point can change”, and that “individuals vary in the rate and extent of adaptation they exhibit to changes in circumstances”.

Adaptation also turns out to be incomplete. Lucas and colleagues reported in 2003 that people adapt fully “after divorce, losing a spouse, the birth of a child, and for women losing their job”, but found no “return to baseline for marriage or for layoffs in men”.

That removes the comfortable reading. The treadmill version says the flatness was inevitable and tells you nothing. The revised version says adaptation varies by person and by event, which makes a given instance of flatness worth examining rather than filing under general human nature.

Worth noting that none of this research concerns executives or career milestones. It concerns marriage, bereavement, unemployment and disability. The extension to a promotion or an exit is an inference, not a finding.

What the Flatness Might Be Reporting

From here on this is a reading rather than a finding, and an earlier version stated it as a fact about most high achievers, which no evidence supports.

The possibility worth sitting with is that the milestone was carrying a second job. The listing was going to prove something. The partnership was going to settle something. The recognition was going to confirm something that had been in question for a long time.

Crocker and Wolfe described the structure of that in Psychological Review in 2001: contingencies of self-worth, the specific domains in which a sense of being worthwhile is staked on how things turn out. In those domains, they write, “people typically have the goal to prove themselves rather than the goal to learn, grow, or improve themselves”. They also describe the arrangement as “a trade-off between increased motivation and increased emotional vulnerability”.

If that is what was happening, the milestone was being asked to function as a verdict. An achievement can serve as evidence about capability. Whether any amount of evidence settles a question about worth is a different matter, and the part of someone that needed it settled tends to respond by moving the marker and starting again.

What Can Be Done With It

An earlier version called this “one of the most valuable signals a high achiever can receive” and promised that leaders who work the question through keep the ambition and lose the desperation. Both are gone: the first is a superlative, the second a result nobody has measured.

Three narrower things.

Separate the duration question from the intensity question. If the milestone felt good and then stopped feeling good, that is the part both sides of the argument above accept, and it says nothing about you. If it never felt like much at all, that is a different observation and worth keeping separate.

Name what the milestone was supposed to settle. Written down in a sentence, it is usually recognisable and usually not about the milestone. That is a question you can answer without any research.

Notice whether the marker has already moved. If a new target appeared within days of reaching the last one, the target was doing something other than being a target. No measurement is needed to observe that; it is a matter of checking the dates.

And if the flatness has stopped looking like a question about ambition and is affecting how you sleep or function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one, including the assessment below.

Where Your Worth Is Currently Resting

If achievement has stopped delivering what you expected of it, the question underneath is what you were expecting it to settle. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes, and it opens a conversation rather than closing one. Begin your profile here.

References

Gilbert, D. T., et al. (1998), on the impact bias in affective forecasting.
Levine, L. J., Lench, H. C., Kaplan, R. L., & Safer, M. A. (2012). Accuracy and artifact: Reexamining the intensity bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2013). The impact bias is alive and well. Comment on Levine et al. (2012).
Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61(4), 305–314.
Lucas, R. E., et al. (2003), panel findings on adaptation to major life events.
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593–623.

The Milestone That Felt Empty: What to Do When Achievement Doesn’t Deliver