The unhappy truth about holidays

In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of everyone in advertising was to work hard for many years, ultimately winning enough accounts and awards to retire to a French farmhouse where they could wake to the smell of fresh bread and black coffee, before driving a rusted 2CV to the local market. ‘A simpler alternative,’ Webster explained, ‘was simply to be born a French peasant, in which case you could cut out the middle bit altogether.’

Retirement plans are prone to what the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman calls ‘affective forecasting’. We think we know what will make us happy. In reality, experiments show humans are very bad at predicting the effect that life changes will have on their levels of happiness, which return to a baseline remarkably fast. Consequently, when we plan to be happy, we may end up less happy than when we don’t plan at all. By defining your sources of happiness too narrowly in advance, you become overinvested in your predefined expectations, leaving you vulnerable to disappointment.

This point was also made by Christian Busch, whom I was privileged to meet recently. Christian is (I kid you not) the Professor of Serendipity at New York University. It is a far more important area of study than it first sounds.

For instance, when we choose where to go on holiday, how many of our advance decisions are driven by misplaced assumptions about what we will enjoy? I am a big advocate of the unplanned driving holiday, since you end up serendipitously discovering wonderful places you never would have planned to visit beforehand.