If there’s one thing humans excel at, it’s finding increasingly imaginative ways to waste their lives away.

Whether it’s scrolling through TikTok, polishing résumés for jobs we don’t want, or organizing our homes into Pinterest-worthy perfection while the only houseguest we’re expecting is a spider weaving quietly in the corner, we seem determined to mistake activity for aliveness. Yet all of these pale in comparison to our greatest time-thief of all: the firm conviction that our real life, the one we’re working hard in preparation for, starts later.

Psychologists call this the arrival fallacy, a term coined by Harvard researcher Tal Ben-Shahar to describe the belief that happiness and fulfillment will finally appear once we’ve achieved a certain milestone. Once we graduate, once we get the promotion, once we meet the right person—it all amounts to the same narrative where we convince ourselves that the real story of our life begins after the next comma, never at this period.

Most of us know this trap intimately from first experience to the point where today might just as well be a waiting room for tomorrow.

As we start this week afresh, let’s see if we can’t give ourselves permission to start living today instead.

Why the brain loves “later”

It’s not your fault that your brain keeps chasing what’s next. Evolution made it that way, and for good reason.

You see, for most of human history, complacency was outright dangerous. The people who survived to give rise to us were those who could accurately anticipate the next threat as well as the next opportunity. At our core, we are all descendants of insatiable planners that couldn’t get enough of whatever it was that kept them going.

The trouble is that what once kept us safe now keeps us restless instead.

Studies show that dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical, peaks not when we get the reward but when we expect it. That anticipation once helped our ancestors plan for lean winters, but today, it keeps us refreshing our emails and craving “just one more” goal to feel complete (Schultz, 2015).

Our brains are wired to crave the promise of “later,” even when we know that the “later” itself never truly arrives. Research on the hedonic treadmill shows that even big life events such as marriages or lottery wins only boost happiness briefly before we adapt and return to baseline from which we seek the next accomplishment (e.g., Brickman & Campbell, 1971).

What kept our ancestors safe is clearly not keeping us satisfied, and living in constant anticipation means never pausing to admire what we already have.

It’s up to our slower, more deliberate System 2 mind to step in and rewrite the story and to remind us that the point of life is not preparation but participation.

So as this week begins, make it a small rebellion against your evolutionary wiring and choose presence over prediction.

How to challenge the myth of readiness

It’s easy to fall for the arrival fallacy because almost everything in modern life reinforces it. We spend our early years chasing grades so we can get into the next school, then chase jobs to fund the next lifestyle, then chase stability so we can finally “start living” the way we’d want to.

Each milestone promises arrival, but in truth it just resets the clock.

Awareness of this habit is where we begin, but it is not enough.

Because if we stop at noticing, what we get is performative mindfulness, where we speak the right words without seeking the transformation we desire.

The real antidote is action, and the simplest place to begin is with the language we use to speak to ourselves.

Happiness Essential Reads

As a first step, start paying attention to how you talk about your life.

When you hear yourself say “after I” or “once I,” pause and try another question instead, such as: What can I enjoy about being on the road there today? Or, what will I miss from today once I arrive?

Next, make the best parts of today more visible by simply paying attention.

A Harvard study of over 2,200 adults found that we spend nearly half our waking hours thinking about something other than what we’re doing, and that this wandering strongly predicts lower happiness (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010).

A simple way to train this is the deathbed test, which asks the simple question of what part of today you would be willing to give everything you owned to relive if only for a moment before it’s all over.

As a parent of young children, I can attest how suddenly the 4 a.m. wake-ups and the spilled cereals stop feeling like interruptions and start feeling like the only moments that are truly worth living in the first place.

You can also look backward instead of forward for the same results.

Think of your 10-years-younger self and what they would feel if they could start with your current wisdom and resources. For them, you are already the version they once dreamed of becoming, maybe even more. Notice how you have already arrived, whether you realized it or not.

Finally, start rehearsing contentment instead of chasing the fireworks version of happiness.

Experiments on gratitude show that people who simply noted things they were thankful for each week became significantly happier and more optimistic over time (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). The arrival fallacy feeds on the myth that joy has to be loud and exuberant. In reality, most contentment is quiet.

Starting today, anchor yourself in the details that make life worth living—from the scent of freshly poured coffee to the wagging tail that greets you at the door—knowing that these small moments are what the mosaic of our lives are built of.

And know that when tomorrow finally does arrive, it will be no more special than what you already hold in your hands today, in the present.

References

Ben-Shahar, T. (2009). Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. McGraw-Hill.

Schultz W. Neuronal Reward and Decision Signals: From Theories to Data. Physiol Rev. 2015 Jul;95(3):853-951.

Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory (pp. 287-305). New York: Academic Press.

Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010 Nov 12;330(6006):932. doi: 10.1126/science.1192439. PMID: 21071660.

Emmons RA, McCullough ME. Counting blessings versus burdens: an experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003 Feb;84(2):377-89.