It happens to all of us. We know that doing something is going to hurt us in the long run but we do it anyway. The dieter eats the donut. The husband cheats on his wife. The new gym member skips a work-out.

Why do we do it?

The answer, I think, is that a course of action is never absolutely clear cut. One donut doesn’t make us fat. The wife may never find out. The gym will be open tomorrow.

If a situation isn’t black-and-white, there is wiggle room. Giving in to our cravings isn’t irrational. All that has happened is that the pros and cons have been reevaluated. The desire for short term reward overpowers concern for long-term potential costs.

I think it is pretty clear that cravings affect how we think. Sometimes cravings are so powerful it is like they decide what they want and then command the rational part of the brain to come up with an explanation for why it is okay.

The power of cravings and other emotions to affect our rational thinking leads to two questions I find interesting:

1. How do we avoid doing things that are bad for us in the short term so that we can meet our long term goals?
2. Given that we are never free of emotion, how confident can we be about any of our rational thought?

Our ability to predict how we will feel in the future is weak.

One result is that we often overestimate how good something will make us feel in the future. We think the new car we have been thinking about for weeks will make us much happier. Once we buy it, the newness quickly wears off and the car becomes plain. It isn’t much different from the old one it replaced.

This effect isn’t limited to purchases. We work hard to land good jobs thinking that we will be happy once we have attained our goal. While a good job is nice, most people quickly begin looking for ways to take the next step up the career ladder.

If good things we strive for often turn out not to be as great as we think they will be, how are we supposed to make good decisions? What are we giving up in the pursuit of these goals? I don’t think there is a simple answer to this problem. Somehow we need to discount our optimism about our goals.

The quote by T.S. Eliot “The journey, not the arrival matters.” perhaps captures the lesson we need to learn.