How would you feel a year after winning the lottery?
Wrong.
How would you feel a year after you got fired?
Wrong.
The academic literature on predicting your future emotions — called affective forecasting — strongly suggests that we are actually quite horrible at predicting our future feelings.
But it has to be this way. If you weren’t terrified of losing your job, then you wouldn’t work diligently to keep it. If you didn’t yearn to succeed, you’d never get out of bed. So of course you have to think that good things will be great and bad things will be miserable.
Likewise, however, you must be wrong.
You cannot rest on your laurels or wallow in despair. You have to prepare to face the next challenge and avoid the next obstacle.
Graduation Time
So it is with so many of my students who are about to graduate.
They’ve consumed the Kool-Aid of the Dixie Chicks’ Lubbock or Leave It.
A few are coactive, but the majority cannot wait to graduate and be done with the dusty Hub City. Their Facebook statuses proclaim their yearning to move onto the next phase of life.
But I know better.
In addition to these graduating seniors, I also know dozens who graduated in the semesters before.
And it’s striking (but not surprising) how many of them want to get back to the South Plains.
Um, Can I Have a Do-Over?
It surprises them, but it’s just another example of affective forecasting to me.
Lubbock’s not New York City, Dallas, or Paris. But it has its charms. The college life also has its charms. Waking up at 10. Three hours of classes. Then margaritas at Chimy’s. It’s a rough life.
And take it from me, the responsibilities of adulthood far outweigh the freedoms. Being an undergraduate is the best job on the planet.
So I’ll enter it in my calendar. The class of December 2009 will begin calling and writing in about a year. They’ll ask about grad school. They’ll tell me that they never thought they’d say it, but they actually miss Lubbock.
I’ve Walked a Mile in Those Shoes
And I’ll understand.
It’s the same way I miss the student newspaper at New Mexico State, the Sandias in Albuquerque, or Bloomington, Indiana. In each case, I was so excited to take on the next adventure in life.
Yet on the other side of that adventure was just more life.
New excitements but new responsibilities.
New temptations and new tribulations.
Most lottery winners aren’t any happier than they were before. Most people find happiness again after divorce, bankruptcy, or firing.
Live for today.
I'm a cognitive scientist and communication scholar who manages a psychophysiology lab at Texas Tech. I teach courses about the cognitive processing of media messages and research methods.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve never understood why so many people hate Lubbock. I fell in love with the city. I’ve recently gained employment here in town, and am excited that I’ll be staying in dusty, old Lubbock, Texas.
Happiness probably has a lot to do with people and relationships more so than places. In my experience, I’ve mostly missed the people at a place than the actual place. Thinking back about all the “good times” at any place I’ve lived thus far, those memories almost always invariably includes people
Your post echoes the best advice I got when I graduated, which was to expect my 1st job to be a “do over.”
It would have been nice to have had the wisdom to listen to that advice at the time… but at that stage of life, I had all the answers, and all the confidence in the world in my predictions.
Not long after I discovered the sagacity of that advice, a certain poem that I had read in school took on a new meaning:
“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way…”
Hopefully, your students will listen to you, and have the sense to relish what they have… now.
Jason Seiden´s last blog ..Passion or Money? You Choose.