Why Anticipation Feels Better Than Arrival

Think about the last thing you genuinely looked forward to. Now try to remember which part you enjoyed more ~ the waiting, or the having.

Most people, once they think about it properly, land on the waiting. That is not a quirk. It appears to be how we are built.

The Wait Is Doing Something Real

When you are looking forward to something, you are not sitting passively. You are imagining it, repeatedly, in slightly different versions.

Every one of those versions is good, because you are the one writing them. Nothing in an imagined outcome is ever slightly wrong, slightly the wrong colour, or slightly smaller than expected.

So the anticipation phase is not one pleasant experience. It is dozens of them, all of them ideal.

Then Reality Has To Pick One

Arrival can only ever be a single version. It is specific, and specificity always loses to imagination on at least one dimension.

This is not a reason to be gloomy about it. It is a reason to stop rushing the front half.

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

Modern life is arranged to compress the wait to nothing. Immediate delivery, instant access, everything now.

Which quietly removes the most enjoyable part of wanting something. We have optimised away the anticipation and kept only the acquiring, then wondered why acquiring things feels flatter than it used to.

There is a genuine argument for deliberately not knowing, and for deliberately waiting, purely because the not knowing is where a good deal of the pleasure lives.

How To Get Some Of It Back

Nothing dramatic. Just small reintroductions of not-knowing.

• Do not look up the ending. Of anything, ever.
• Let somebody else order for you occasionally.
• Leave a parcel unopened for an hour rather than tearing into it in a doorway.
• Say yes to something before you have all the details.

The Point Of All This

Certainty is comfortable and it is not particularly interesting. The moment before you know is the good bit, and it is entirely free.

Stretch it out a little. It is one of the few pleasures that costs nothing at all.

Written by MYSTERY TEES. Thanks for reading.