Choosing Relationships Over Resolutions

Why we're terrible at predicting what will make us happy.

Continued thanks to everyone for your support! I’ll be off next week, but I’ll start the new year with my First Friday Q&A. You can email me at kathleensmithwrites@gmail.com and I might answer your question (and keep you anonymous). - K

I love the new year, and I love a goal planner. But like most humans, I’m terrible at predicting what goals will make me happy.

New year’s resolutions are our best guesses at what will make a good life. And what do our guesses tend to be? Professional success, a thinner body, or better finances often top the list.

But we know what makes a good life. It’s no secret, given what’s helped us succeed as a species—good relationships.

I’ve been reading The Good Life, a wonderful dive into the longest scientific study on happiness, the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The authors, who direct the study, discuss our poor capacity for affective forecasting (the ability to predict what will make us happy).

“We seem particularly bad at forecasting the benefits of relationships,” they write. “A big part of this is the obvious fact that relationships can be messy and unpredictable. This messiness is some of what prompts many of us to prefer being alone. It’s not just that we are seeking solitude; it’s that we want to avoid the potential mess of connecting with others. But we overestimate that mess and underestimate the beneficial effects of human connection. This is a feature of our decision making in general: we pay a lot of attention to potential costs and downplay or dismiss potential benefits.”