I’ve been looking forward to writing this piece. It’s already not living up to expectations. I find writing quite challenging, especially the first few sentences. Writing is nearly always more enjoyable in anticipation than in experience. You might think that I would have worked that out by now. But if I’m going to write anyway, then looking forward to it will make me a whole lot happier than dreading it. The more you look forward to doing something, the happier you will be.
There may be some events that are experienced as less enjoyable when expectations have been raised. Think of the number of times you’ve been looking forward to a party, a family dinner or watching a film only for the event to fall flat. But the chances are that the event was going to be shit anyway, whether you looked forward to it or not. Your excitement about it being a great event will only play a small part in how you experience it. How much I was looking forward to witting this article is largely an irrelevance to how I’m feeling about the experience of doing so.
Moreover, most events, like nights out, only last a few hours. We can look forward to them for weeks. This adds to my long list of obvious but overlooked observations. It also challenges that one route to happiness is through low expectations. Well, context matters, of course, and low expectations about life in general might serve us well. But relatively low expectations about a future event is simply relatively low happiness. Here’s the thing: anticipations are themselves experiences. Our lives are one long list of experiences, relating to what we are doing, but also to what we will be doing, or to what we have done.
We may not always be aware of how we’re feeling in response to an experience, such as when we “notice” that our humming fridge was making us feel a bit anxious only when it stops humming and we feel immediately calmer in comparison. Moreover, we may not always be aware of how we’re feeling in anticipation of an event, such as when we’re in a slightly better mood the day before a party. We have some app-based data showing that people are happier when they are resting on the day before a day they have reported as being one they are looking forward to. Equally, they are less happy when resting on the day before a day they are not looking forward to.
Regardless, we are always experiencing something – always feeling something – in response to a stimulus. And that stimulus does not have to relate to anything or anyone in the current moment. Indeed, our app data show that when our minds wander away from what we are doing and who we are with, the most likely place it wanders off to is the future.
You may have heard about the concept of the experience economy. As the name implies, this is where economic activity is directed towards the provision and consumption of experiences rather than commodities. Increasingly, consumers are spending money on dining, festivals, and holidays instead of cars and clothes. The emphasis in the discussion surrounding the experience economy is on creating memorable experiences, thus focusing on what we can recall, discuss, and share after an event. In truth, there hasn’t been much emphasis on the memories themselves, only on creating experiences that are expected to lead to fond memories.
There has been very little consideration of anticipation experiences. This is a surprising oversight, especially when so much of the happiness we get from experiences is in the looking forward. There are data showing that holidays would largely be a waste of time and money if the happiness in anticipation of the event was not considered. Family holidays are so often the triumph of hope over experience.
It is true that some companies and promoters engage in content marketing by creating and sharing teasers and trailers for forthcoming events. But rarely are the monetary and hedonic values of these activities quantified. We are looking forward (see what I did there) to embarking on a research programme that seeks to measure and value the anticipation economy in ways that will help companies and consumers increase producer and consumer surplus, respectively.
We have very high expectations about the impact of this research, not least because it makes us happy to think in this way. But it could be even more impactful if you were able to join us in this endeavour. I am increasingly looking to conduct research with a wide range of collaborators. Where appropriate, and tying into my work on reducing beliefism, I would like to engage in adversarial collaborations, where we set out our different beliefs about what we expect to find before agreeing on an empirical approach to putting out beliefs to the test. I anticipate that I’ll be proved right, of course.