The Arrival Fallacy
A culture of performative social media, promises this happy ending and completion upon arrival. But do we ever even arrive?
Most days my runs contain some form of the self-belief conversation. This is the conversation I have before a long run when I know it will feel hard to complete the distance. It’s the head trash talk that shows up when I have a running workout on the schedule and I start to think about swapping it to another day — for no good reason at all.
It’s a flavour of the same conversation that fills my mind in the middle of the workout when I don’t think I can hit the splits. I start to believe the bullshit story I’m telling myself about it being too much, too fast, too many repeats . And it is the same conversation I have when it is hard — in the heat, in the wind, when I’m tired, when I’m sore.
Some days running is still hard.
Some days, even after 20 years, it is still an-every-step-is-hard-struggle to put one foot in front of the other and finish the distance. But I know this. I know it is going to be like this. I don’t run because it is easy or because I know I can. I run because it is hard.
I’m good at having these conversations with myself when it’s hard. I know how to talk myself through almost any story that plays out and I know how to hold my own hand when it starts to get hard and I think I can’t get through. But it has only been with time and practice, thousands of hours of running, and an underlying love for the process and movement itself that has let me get there. It wasn’t like one day I decided I should run, it was awesome and now I never have any more hard or bad days.
I don’t think everyone should be a runner. In fact, completely the opposite: if you don’t like running and you don’t want to run, don’t run. But I do think we need to stop perpetuating this fallacy around it eventually getting easy, or telling people that if they just stick it out long enough “you will like it.” Maybe. But also, some days I hate running.
This isn’t just about running. You could take out running and replace it with any of the “shoulding” activities that float around mainstream media that are hard or uncomfortable: you “should” have a cold shower, you “should” do intermittent fasting, you “should” do push-ups every day.
What this is about is the Arrival Fallacy. The Arrival Fallacy assumes that as soon as we arrive at a pre-designated status or reach a pre-defined level of success, everything will be easy and we will be happy. As soon as we start running and do it for a few days, we will love running and be on the path to reach our goals. As soon as we start taking cold showers, we will love it and it will become easy to do it every day.
I get discouraged by the number of people who are let down by the arrival fallacy. We like this idea of finish lines and happy endings. We thrive on cognitive closure and checking things off a list as completed. As a result, the propagated theme is that of doing a thing, and once it is done it will change your life.
But what about tomorrow? What about if it is a thing you have to do on repeat? There are bound to be days when it doesn’t go well, you don’t want to do it, or there is no finish line. Our culture of performative social media however, has broken this away, promising this happiness and completion upon arrival. But when do you even arrive? It’s a lie. It’s letting us down.
If I stick with the running theme, the more realistic picture around it is that some days it’s actually terrible. Yesterday, it was 25 degrees out. It hasn’t been anywhere near 25 for months. It was so windy that entire trees were swaying, and there was no cloud cover in sight. I set off on my run, trying to downplay the stories of dread, and convince myself it wouldn’t be terrible. I kept reminding myself that I had acclimatised well to the heat last year and got good at running in the warmer weather: “it will be okay,” I reassured myself.
The truth is, it was terrible.
If I had been betting on the arrival of the finish line yesterday to convince me running was great, I would never have finished. Nor would I have concluded running is great. But it’s a bit like the stock market. Some days you have highs and everything lines up: the weather is great, your pace is on point, you feel amazing, you smash your goal. Other days, you sink to the depths of low, hauling ass back home, using every ounce of energy and mental strength you have just to get to the end. The general trajectory though, is that it goes up. You improve and it gets easier, you enjoy it more and you reach your goals more frequently. If you hope to just arrive and have it done, you never get to cash in on the best the trajectory has to offer. If you wait it out though, and you push through all the slogs and hot weather days and show up on the days you don’t want to, the arrival is that you get more than you ever could have imagined. You can’t imagine what it’s like to get the best of something you can’t even imagine.
If there is something you want to start, stop, cultivate, or quit, the arrival fallacy is just that: false. Let it go. Walk away from letting yourself believe that a hard thing will just become easy or that every finish will be with fanfare. Learn to discern the difference between something begun hard and you needing to talk yourself through it, compared to you not liking something and not wanting to do it. Let’s start getting a bit more honest with ourselves and each other about all of this shouldding, and embrace hard things. We can do hard things.
