“I’ve always wanted to…”
The barrier to our dreams
„Dum differtur vita transcurrit.
Whilst one puts things off, life slips away.“
I firmly believe that we only have this one life and should therefore experience it in all its facets. Yet sometimes I catch myself, and many of my family and friends, saying things like “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do that” or “I’ll get round to doing that one day”.
The frequency with which I’ve come across this lately made me think about why we so often dream of something, yet then frequently put it off or let it slip away altogether.
The trip to Paris
I’m sitting in the kitchen whilst visiting family. My wife and I haven’t been back home for quite some time, so we’re making the most of the opportunity to share our experiences from the past few months, including our latest trip to Paris. We love the city, the food, the way of life, the art, and we absolutely love simply wandering through the streets, because there’s always something new to discover. As we talk about strolling along the Seine and eating ice cream from Berthillon, I hear it again: “Oh, I’d love to do that too!”
Everyone nods, someone says, “Yes, you really should do that sometime,” and the conversation moves on. No one asks when, it hangs in the air and then fades away.
What strikes me as odd is that this statement sounds like a wish. A rather big one, in fact, when I consider how often it’s uttered. Yet this phrase also seems to be the most reliable place for these wishes to vanish without us having to give them up.
When dreaming causes our dreams to die
Dreams are pleasant, and thinking intensely about a vague future event gives us the feeling that we have already done something to achieve that goal. Gollwitzer et al. (2009) found that expressing identity-related intentions led to goal-oriented actions being implemented less concretely when others took note of them than when the expression was ignored. The sense of encouragement derived from others’ reactions generated a feeling of recognition without having done anything to earn it, thereby weakening motivation. The expectation of being able to achieve something and the fantasy of how wonderful it would be feel almost the same internally, but have opposite effects. Oettingen and Mayer (2002) demonstrated in four experiments that fantasising reduces one’s own drive and even caused participants’ blood pressure to drop. The more important something is to you, the greater the loss of motivation and the more costly the mere act of imagining it becomes.
Moreover, a wish without a deadline cannot fail and costs nothing. I do not need to venture into uncertain waters that I might not be able to control, such as facing a language I do not understand at my dream holiday destination. It protects me from the mental strain of planning and the associated effort of having to alter my current daily routine to accommodate it. If I’d like to learn Italian, that would mean setting aside time every day to make real progress, and that time isn’t available for my daily routines.
Particularly on clearly defined occasions such as birthdays, the start of a new year or the start of a new month, search queries relating to healthy eating, fitness or other personal commitments rise significantly. Such milestones mark a break and allow us to relegate past failures to a closed chapter. They unlock our potential by allowing us to leave our old selves behind, but in doing so they also burden us with the pressure to be someone entirely new. However, the high expectations and drastic changes that come with a ‘New Me’ are hardly sustainable, and our daily routines are the ground to which we fall back when we fail to live up to them.
The desire to learn a new language, go on a trip, learn an instrument or finally get fit also preserves the possibility of a different life as a pleasant notion. The statement keeps open the possibility of being someone else. Taking concrete steps, however, would bring reality into the picture and force us to reconcile our expectations with it. Closing off this possibility robs us of our subjectively perceived potential and, with it, our motivation. When we get down to specifics, we swap a beautiful ideal for a reality we perceive as mediocre.
True regret
The review by Gilovich and Medvec (1995) showed that, in the short term, people mainly regret what they have done, but in the long term they regret what they have not done.
We shy away from putting into action the idea we’ve had for so long, from filming the videos we’ve long wanted to post, from planning the trip we’ve always wanted to take, because we’re afraid of making fools of ourselves in the short term, of losing money, or of trading security for uncertainty. Yet, in the long run, these are the very things we’ll look back on and say: ‘If only I’d just gone ahead and done it.’
The danger rarely lies directly within our reach, but rather where we cannot (yet) see it. Namely, at the moment when we realise that the opportunities have passed and we haven’t seized any of them.
At this point, this is not meant to be a simple appeal in the style of a calendar quote saying ‘Get on with it’, but rather a wake-up call to think about what you want to experience and achieve in this life, and to realise what the cost will be if we don’t do it today.
Ask yourself whether there are things on your bucket list that you wouldn’t want to miss out on having done in twenty years’ time. And if there really are things that fill you with anticipation and make you feel excited, keep them to yourself for now and set a specific date and a clear trigger for that first small step.
“When I get home from work on Wednesday evening, I’ll have a light snack and do 10 minutes of exercise.” Beforehand, lay out your trainers, mat and towel first thing in the morning, so that the barrier to starting is as low as possible. It might not stop at 10 minutes, but even the smallest possible goal makes it concrete and a step in the right direction. Alternatively, it could be installing a language app to learn a new language or planning that long-awaited trip.
For the week ahead
Exercise
Pick one item from your ‘someday’ list and do exactly two things with it:
Firstly: Set a specific date for it , it doesn’t matter which one.
Secondly: Formulate the first step as an ‘if-then’ statement linked to an occasion that’s going to happen this week anyway. So not ‘I intend to’, but ‘When I have my morning coffee on Saturday, I’ll do some research for the trip’.
Three questions:
What role does the phrase ‘sometime’ play for me right now?
What is this wish protecting me from, as long as it doesn’t have a date?
Which item on my list would I miss in twenty years’ time, and which wouldn’t I?
Have fun thinking about it, and see you next week.
— Luc
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Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901
Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of regret: What, when, and why. Psychological Review, 102(2), 379–395. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.102.2.379
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta‐analysis of Effects and Processes. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Bd. 38, S. 69–119). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
Gollwitzer, P. M., Sheeran, P., Michalski, V., & Seifert, A. E. (2009). When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap? Psychological Science, 20(5), 612–618. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02336.x
Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719–729. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.02.003
Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1198–1212. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1198
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Thinking from Scratch
by Luc Albrecht
Exploring how we think, decide and create clarity
