The joy of anticipation
The anticipation of an experience is often more gratifying than the experience itself. Most people discover this when reality falls short of what they had imagined, and conclude that hoping and dreaming are best given up. But the insight can be turned the other way, and made a source of deliberate joy.
Amelia Earhart’s plane vanished without a trace somewhere over the Pacific in July 1937, on the most ambitious leg of her attempt to circumnavigate the world. She left behind cables, diary entries, and logbook notations, which her husband George Putnam later assembled into a posthumous book, Last Flight. Among her observations was one much broader than aviation: that the anticipation of an experience is often more gratifying than the experience itself.
Almost a century earlier, and a continent away, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had arrived at the same conclusion. There is a popular saying, “the joy of anticipation is the greatest,” that is often attributed to him, along with a colourful story about him cancelling a theatre date with his fiancée at the last minute to make the point. Both the line and the story are gossip; the saying is not his, and the theatre evening, by his fiancée’s own later account, ended early only because Kierkegaard had a headache.
It is not hard to see why the saying ended up attached to him, since the underlying idea is genuinely his. In The Seducer’s Diary, one of the sections of Either/Or, the character Johannes consistently prefers the suspense of pursuit to the satisfaction of conquest; possibility to its realisation. And in the Diapsalmata, the aphorisms that open the aesthete’s half of the same book, Kierkegaard puts the point this way:
Two figures could hardly be less alike: an American aviator pushing the boundaries of what a human body and a propeller engine could endure, and a European philosopher whose solitary thought would help lay the foundations of existentialism. Yet both arrived at the same conclusion, which most people learn at some point in their lives—that the pleasant anticipation of a future experience, whether a holiday, a romantic evening, or a promotion at work, is often more gratifying than the experience itself.
The defeatist interpretation
When reality falls short of what one had hoped for, disappointment follows. Repeated often enough, this gap teaches a lesson, and the lesson is not a subtle one: that hope is what makes the disappointment possible in the first place. Since disappointment is unpleasant, the instinctive response is to hope less, and so to be exposed less. Better to expect little, and so be spared the gap between what one had hoped for and what one got.
Applied across a life, the prescription is consistent. The trip abroad might not match the photographs that prompted it, so one might as well stay at home. The romantic evening might not match what one had pictured, so one might as well not bother. The new career might not deliver what one hoped for—or worse, one might fail at it—so one might as well stick with the current one. Wherever there is a hope, there is the prospect of the hope falling short, and the safest protection is not to hope at all.
This is the defeatist reading of the principle, and it has a certain defensive logic. The person who wants nothing cannot be disappointed; the person who expects nothing is rarely surprised by what life delivers. Many people, having been disappointed a few times, drift into this position without ever quite naming it, and live the rest of their lives a little smaller than they need to.
The deliberate interpretation
The common reply to the defeatist is straightforward: even an imperfect experience usually beats no experience at all. The evening out that fell short of what one had pictured is still better than the one spent at home protected against disappointments. The risk of disappointment, in this view, is the price of admission to a fuller life, and the price is worth paying.
But there is a more thoughtful response, one that embraces the principle rather than working around it. If the anticipation of an experience is often more satisfying than the experience itself, then one needs to be far more deliberate about the anticipation. Rather than treating it as a step on the way to the experience, one should treat it as an integrated part of the experience, and savour the time leading up to it rather than hurrying mindlessly through.
Kierkegaard, in another aphorism from the same Diapsalmata, names the mistake directly:
What does this look like in practice? Consider the summer holiday. Rather than booking it at the last minute, one books it months in advance, so that the anticipation has room to grow. And one treats those months as part of the holiday itself: looking up the hotel, picking out restaurants, learning a few phrases of the local language, imagining the long evenings, the unfamiliar streets, the chance encounters. The point is not to plan the trip into a state of certainty—that would defeat the purpose—but to inhabit the possibility of it, and let the joy of that possibility unfold over weeks rather than be compressed into a frantic week of packing. Even if the trip were cancelled, one would already have had something good. Perhaps even, as the principle suggests, the better part.
A more extreme illustration is the lottery ticket. The mathematical odds of winning are vanishingly small, and on any rational accounting the price of the ticket is money lost. But this is to misread what is actually being purchased. What the buyer takes home is not a chance at the jackpot, which they will almost certainly never see, but a license to dream—a few days of imagining the house, the freedom, the rearranged life—and that is what they pay for, and what they receive. The few who do win often find the money a mixed blessing; the many who do not have already had what they came for.
Conclusion
Most people drift into the defeatist interpretation of the anticipation principle by default. It is rarely a conscious decision, but each disappointment they experience in life pushes them a little further in that direction, until it becomes their default attitude towards the future. The deliberate interpretation takes what at first glance is a negative observation—that anticipation often exceeds realisation—and turns it into a source of joy.
But the anticipation principle is, unfortunately, not only an amplifier of pleasure before positive future events, but also an amplifier of worry before negative ones. Most people have probably dreaded an event for weeks, only to find, when it finally came, that the experience was less bad than they had feared. Worry, like joy, is amplified in advance.
So the final lesson is that if one has something pleasant to look forward to, like a dream holiday, it makes sense to extend the period leading up to it, to maximise the pleasure. Whereas if it is something one dreads, like a check-up at the dentist, it makes sense to schedule it as quickly as possible, to minimise the worry.