You get the promotion.
For a day, maybe two, it's everything you pictured. The calls, the congratulations, the quiet satisfaction of having actually done it. Then Monday arrives. The new title sits on your door, and somehow you're already looking past it.
Not at nothing. At the next one.
The Illusion With A Name
A Harvard researcher named Tal Ben-Shahar spent years chasing a version of this himself. As a young elite squash player, he was certain a national championship would finally deliver the peace he'd been working toward.
He won.
The peace lasted about a day. Then the old pressure crept straight back in, like it had never left.
Ben-Shahar later named the pattern the arrival fallacy: the belief that reaching a destination will produce lasting happiness. [1]
He wasn't describing weakness. He was describing a design flaw that catches nearly everyone, especially the men most capable of hitting their targets.