I recently passed my advanced motorcycle test with the IAM. A F1RST, no less. The highest grade. And within hours of getting the result, I’d already started telling myself it wasn’t that impressive.
This happens every time. The thing I’ve been working toward, the qualification, the goal, the milestone, suddenly feels smaller the moment I reach it. Not worthless, exactly. Just… less. As though the act of achieving it somehow deflated the whole thing.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. There’s a term for it: the arrival fallacy. The idea that we assume reaching a destination will bring lasting satisfaction, only to find that satisfaction evaporates almost the moment we arrive. We spend months, sometimes years, chasing something, convinced it matters. And then we get there, look …
I recently passed my advanced motorcycle test with the IAM. A F1RST, no less. The highest grade. And within hours of getting the result, I’d already started telling myself it wasn’t that impressive.
This happens every time. The thing I’ve been working toward, the qualification, the goal, the milestone, suddenly feels smaller the moment I reach it. Not worthless, exactly. Just… less. As though the act of achieving it somehow deflated the whole thing.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. There’s a term for it: the arrival fallacy. The idea that we assume reaching a destination will bring lasting satisfaction, only to find that satisfaction evaporates almost the moment we arrive. We spend months, sometimes years, chasing something, convinced it matters. And then we get there, look around, and think: is that it?
Some of it is just recalibration. What felt like a stretch yesterday becomes the new baseline today. But I think there’s something else going on too, at least for me. Once I’ve done something, I can see exactly how I did it. Every small step, every moment of doubt, every bit of luck. The mystery disappears. And without the mystery, it stops feeling like an achievement. It starts feeling inevitable, even though it wasn’t.
The IAM test is a good example. It has a real failure rate. You can’t charm your way through it or stumble into a F1RST by accident. An examiner who doesn’t know you, doesn’t care about your backstory, watches you ride for over an hour and makes a judgement. It’s external. Objective. Difficult. And yet, within a day, my brain had already filed it under things that were always going to happen.
I suspect this is a feature, not a bug. If we stayed satisfied, we’d stop striving. The restlessness that makes achievements feel hollow is probably the same restlessness that pushed us toward them in the first place. But knowing that doesn’t make it less frustrating. It just makes it feel like a trap, one we set for ourselves, over and over again.
So what’s the answer? I’m not sure there is one. Maybe the goal isn’t to feel permanently satisfied, but to get better at pausing. At noticing. At letting the moment land before the next one arrives. Maybe value isn’t something we feel. It’s something we decide to assign, consciously, before our brains have a chance to reclassify it as ordinary.
I passed my advanced test. I got a F1RST. That matters. Even if I have to keep reminding myself.