How to make difficult life choices when you can’t know if your choice will make you happy.

I have been facing a big, difficult decision; whether or not to accept a job offer that will uproot my family and move us to the far side of the world. It’s a difficult choice because I can’t know if my selection will make us happy. But maybe asking if my decision will make me happy is not the right question.

You Can’t Know the Future

There is no way to know if my choice will make me happy. I can’t predict the future. In fact, when it comes to predicting how we will feel in the future, humans have a terrible track record. Psychologists call this Affective Forecasting and their research says we are awful at it.

Try this little thought experiment. Imagine you just won the lottery. All the money you need to pay off debts and buy yourself a better future is now yours. How happy would you feel when you got the news? And how happy would you be a year later?

Now try the opposite. Imagine you are injured in a horrible car accident and left paralyzed and unable to walk. Now ask yourself how miserable you would feel upon learning your prognosis and how you would feel in one year.

Got your answers in mind? Then let’s look and see how your predictions compare to a classic research paper from 1978. If you predicted an initial boost in happiness with winning the lottery and a drop in life satisfaction upon becoming paralyzed, you would be right. But here is where it gets interesting, after one year, both groups returned to near their baseline level of happiness. That is right, at one year, the lottery winners were no happier than the people with paraplegia. It seems impossible, but it is true.

You Are More Resilient than You Think

It turns out that humans have a much greater capacity for resilience than we realize. People have a fantastic ability to rationalize almost any event in their lives, even the most tragic. This is good news if you face a significant loss in your life but discouraging if you want to improve your life and become happier.

If We Can’t Predict the Future, How Do We Choose?

Here is the dilemma I was facing; if we are bad at predicting how we will feel in the future, how would I know if the decision I made would improve our lives?

An old Zen saying tells us, “When the student is ready, the master will appear.” That is what happened to me. The master appeared in the form of a quotation. It comes from the Jungian psychotherapist and author of several books, Dr. James Hollis. He tells us that we should not ask, “Will this make me happy?” when we face a major life decision. Instead, we need to ask, “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”

What Will Enlarge You

You may be terrible at predicting what will make you happy, but you have an intuitive feeling for what will enlarge you. You know if a decision is a “step forward into growth or step backwards into safety,” as humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow put it. You know if you are cheating yourself out of growth by choosing to pursue the “safer path.”

Choose to step forward into growth.

The tricky part is facing the fact that stepping forward into growth means stepping away from safety. Is it safer to stay with the dead-end job you have or the relationship you are in than to take a risk and strike out in search of something better? There is no way to know if you will be happier, but you can tell if you will grow and learn from the experience. More importantly, you know that you will be less if you never take the chance.

Learn more: How choosing safety may kill your dreams.

My Choice

When I looked at my opportunity to take my family to the far side of the world, the enormity of that decision scared me. It would be safer and easier to stay where I am. But that would cheat my family and me out of a growth opportunity. I can’t know if going will make us happier, but I can know that letting fear hold us back will make us smaller people who shrank away from a challenge. I know that I will regret it if I do not go, and I don’t want to live with regret.

I’m choosing to step into the unknown, with the only certainty being that I will be enlarged by the experience, whether it turns out to be good or bad. Rather than let fear turn me away, I will turn toward what scares me, step towards it, and become a stronger person in the end. That is enough for me to know what I need to do.

Conclusion

When you find yourself facing a critical decision, don’t ask, “Will this make me happy?” but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” Then face the fear of stepping away from safety and into growth. You can’t know if your choice will make you a happier person, but you can take comfort in knowing that it will make you a bigger and better person. To do otherwise is to live with fear and regret, and those are two feelings that are not conducive to happiness.

Learn More:

When You Trust Yourself, Then You Will Know How to Live

How to Stop Worry from Cheating You Out of Living.

You’re Not Stressed, You’re Excited. How to Make Stress Your Friend.