Transcription
Have you ever worked towards something for your entire life, finally got it, and felt [music] absolutely nothing? It's the climax of Pixar's soul. Joe Gardner just played the gig of a lifetime with [music] jazz legend Dorothia Williams. He is sweating like a madman, completely lost in the music, absolutely in love with his work. The crowd goes wild. He steps outside into the cool New York City night. His name is on the marquee. He did it. And then he looks at Dorothia and asks, "What happens next?" She tells him they come back and do it all again tomorrow. [music] And Joe just stands there wandering out of the venue, feeling completely empty. He is wondering what it was all for.
Imagine dedicating your entire existence to a single gig, only to find out it was just like any other job. Slightly more exciting, sure, but not the magical, lifealtering salvation you were expecting. At that point, anyone would fall into an instant state of depression. [music] You realize that all the people you could have connected with, all the opportunities you passed up, and all the days you took for granted are long gone.
I feel like we gaslight ourselves every time we watch this movie because Soul is marketed as a cute animated film about jazz and [music] finding your spark, a movie that cost $150 million to make and spent four years in production. It won two Academy Awards and holds a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. But when you strip away the jokes, the body swapping cat and the ethereal glowing blobs, Soul isn't really a movie about following your dreams. It's a movie about the paralyzing psychological trap of deferred happiness. It is a brutal, uncomfortable mirror held up to every adult who has ever caught themselves saying, "When I finally get this, then I'll be happy." Psychologists actually have a name for this. It's called the arrival fallacy and it is ruining your life.
Now, before we get into the heavy psychological profiling of a cartoon jazz pianist, we have to establish the baseline. We have to look at who Joe Gardner actually is. Joe is a middle school band teacher with big dreams of becoming a professional jazz musician. From the moment we meet him, it's clear that music isn't merely a hobby. It is his lifeblood. He constantly reiterates how jazz is his life, his dream, and his one reason for living. But Joe is not happy in his job or where he is in life. He believes his failures have nothing to do with him and everything to do with others who've never given him a chance. To him, the only way to do right by his spark is to live a certain archetypal life. With his name on a marquee and countless gigs in the big city, Joe's ambition is pointing him toward a happiness that can only exist in the future. And it points him entirely away from the happiness that exists in each present moment. He fixates on his career at the expense of his connection to the world around him. He stops paying attention to the details, the small, mundane, and unremarkable things because he sees them as insignificant. There's this scene early on where his mother reprimands him. She says, "You can't eat dreams for breakfast." She is literally begging him to be realistic and consider other aspects of his life. And Joe responds with, "I don't want to eat." Think about how absurd that is for a second. The man is literally willing to starve himself, to ignore the basic biological necessity of breakfast because he thinks his purpose is the only thing that gives life meaning. He is so obsessed with his dream that he doesn't stop for a single moment to appreciate being alive. And we applaud this. Throughout the film, the audience is rooting for Joe. We want him to succeed because the idea of following one's ambition is a widely accepted celebrated notion in our society. We are culturally conditioned to believe that achieving our dreams equals fulfillment. But the movie is actively setting us up for a devastating psychological reality check.
Enter Dr. Tal Ben Shahar. He is a Harvard trained positive psychology expert and he coined the term arrival fallacy in his book happier. Ben Shahar defines the arrival fallacy as the illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness. He actually discovered this through his own life. As a young elite squash player, he believed that if he could just win a major tournament, he would finally be happy. And he did win. and he was happy for about 5 minutes. Once the euphoria faded, he found himself faced with stress, pressure, and a hollow feeling of emptiness. Accomplishing one goal simply led to a new sporting target being uncovered. His list of goals was never fully completed. Dr. Benshahar says the arrival fallacy is the exact reason why some Hollywood stars struggle so deeply with mental health. These individuals start out unhappy, but they say to themselves, "It's okay, because when I make it, then I'll be happy." But then they make it. They get the Oscar, the mansion, the fame. And while they may feel briefly fulfilled, the feeling doesn't last. But this time, it's worse. This time, they are unhappy without hope. Because before they lived under the false hope that achieving their dream would fix them. When the illusion is shattered, there is nothing left to hold on to. This is exactly what happens to Joe outside the jazz club. He is a man who just lost his false hope.
But why does our brain do this to us? Why are we so fundamentally bad at predicting what will make us happy? Well, psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have spent decades studying this and they call it the impact bias. The impact bias refers to our tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future circumstances. Gilbert and Wilson conducted dozens of studies on this. They looked at college professors who were up for tenure. These professors expected to be happy for years if they got tenure and devastated for years if they were denied. But when the researchers checked back in, the two groups were equally happy after just a brief amount of time. They studied voters during major elections. Voters invariably predict that if their candidate wins, they're going to be ecstatic for months. In reality, their baseline happiness is barely influenced by electoral outcomes. We are biologically terrible at predicting our own emotional futures.
And that brings us to the most terrifying psychological concept of all, hedonic adaptation, also known as the hedonic treadmill. In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell proposed a theory that people return to a relatively stable baseline level of happiness regardless of external changes. In 1978, Brickman put this to the ultimate test. He surveyed a group of recent lottery winners, people who had literally won millions of dollars, and he found that just 18 months after winning the lottery, these people were no happier than a control group of regular people who hadn't won a dime. Let me repeat that winning the lottery did not make them permanently happier because of the brain's vententral strriatum. This is the critical player in the brain's reward system. When you get a reward like a new car, a promotion or a massive gig playing with Dorothia Williams, the vententral stray item lights up. You feel a surge of excitement, but over time it becomes less responsive to the exact same rewards. The novelty wears off. The new car just becomes your commute. The massive paycheck just becomes your new normal. The dream gig just becomes your Tuesday night. Life is simply a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal seeking. The achievement treadmill keeps us running toward an evermoving finish line, preventing us from ever feeling truly satisfied. [music]
And this isn't just academic theory. This is the exact crisis that birthed this movie. Pete Doctor, the director of Soul, is a record three-time recipient of the Academy Award for best animated feature. He directed Up, he directed Inside Out. He is at the absolute pinnacle of his industry. And yet, he admitted that while making Soul, he was going through a midlife crisis. He had spent his whole life building animated films, achieving every goal he ever set, and he still found himself asking, "Is this it?" He wondered what things he would actually look back on at the end of his life and consider worthy of his limited time on earth.
If you want to know the answer to that question, you don't ask a Hollywood director. You ask someone who was out of time. Bronny wear was a paliotative care nurse who spent 8 years caring for patients in the final weeks of their lives. In 2009, she wrote a blog post called Regrets of the Dying that was read by 8 million people and turned into a massive book. She recorded the top five regrets of people on their deathbeds. And the patterns are devastating. Every single male patient she nursed had the exact same regret. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. They deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence, missing their children's youth and their partner's companionship. But the regret that hits hardest, the one that perfectly mirrors Joe Gardner's tragic flaw, is this. I wish I had let myself be happier. They hadn't realized until the very end that happiness was a choice. They had focused entirely on external validation, completely missing the incredible, small, magnificent moments in between that actually bring joy. When people realize that their life is almost over, they see clearly that they spent their entire existence in the waiting room of their own lives.
But here is the ultimate tragic irony of Joe's story. Joe already had the answer. He had it in his fingers every single time he sat down at the piano. Throughout the movie, we see Joe enter a state of focused bliss while playing what he calls being zoned out. In positive psychology, this is known as the flow state coined by Mihi Chickix Mihi. Flow is the mental state where a person is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus and enjoyment in the process of an activity. Chicks Mihali literally described it as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake where the ego falls away, time flies, and every action follows inevitably from the previous one. Like playing jazz, flow is about the process, not the destination. But instead of recognizing that this feeling, the absorption, the presence, the joy in the act itself is what happiness actually feels like, Joe mistakes the achievement for the goal. He thinks the gig is the prize, but the playing was the prize all along.
And science backs this up with terrifying precision. In a landmark study published in the journal Science, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects thoughts and feelings. They found that people spend 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are actually doing. Nearly half of our lives are spent entirely in our own heads. And their conclusion was brutal. A human mind is a wandering mind and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. They found that only 4.6% of a person's happiness was attributable to the specific activity they were doing. But their mind wandering status accounted for nearly 11% of their happiness. Meaning it matters far less what you are achieving and far more whether you are actually present while you do it. We live in the future, not the present. We are so obsessed with the dull past or the promising future that we completely miss the only thing that is actually real, the now.
This is why 22, the unborn soul who takes over Joe's body, is so crucial to the story. 22 appreciates the simple basic parts of living. walking, eating a slice of pizza, feeling the wind. When she tells Joe that maybe skywatching or walking could be her spark, Joe dismisses it. He undervalues the mundane aspect of living because he is infected with the arrival fallacy. But 22 understands what a massive 2024 study from the University of Southampton just proved. Researchers found that just 10 minutes of daily mindfulness of simply being present in the moment reduced depression by 19.2% 2% and anxiety by 12.6%. The antidote to the achievement treadmill isn't to stop having goals. It is to anchor yourself in the present.
Now, let's be real for a second. This is a fine lesson, except that the message is coming from a multi-million dollar film produced by one of the largest media corporations on the planet. A corporation whose sole mission is to produce content that releases serotonin in your brain and prompts you to open your wallet. And let's not forget, Joe does get to play his dream gig. The movie doesn't punish him by taking that away, but the film doesn't say, "Don't chase your dreams." It says, "Don't make your life contingent on them."
In the climactic moments of the film, Joe finally has his epiphany. He realizes that his life's meaning comes and always has come from the beauty of small moments. playing the piano with his father, walking barefoot on the beach with his mother, eating a slice of his favorite pie. Happiness is more alive for Joe in these memories than it ever was after his triumphant concert. He pulls the most ordinary of objects from his pocket, a seed pod from a maple tree, and he is confronted with its absolute simplicity. The movie doesn't tell us to abandon our ambition. Having objectives is essential to personal growth. Working toward a goal can be an incredibly powerful source of happiness. But the trick is to stop viewing possible futures as static destinations that will magically cure your dissatisfaction. Life is an inherently dynamic process. The present isn't just a waiting room for your real life to begin. Your real life is happening right now while you are busy looking at the clock.
Joe's task and ours is to recognize that we are not driven by something outside of ourselves to achieve completion. We were complete the day we were born. The opposite of emptiness isn't achievement. It's presence. You can have your name in lights, play the biggest gig in the world, and still feel completely alone if you aren't actually there to experience it. The real terror isn't failing to achieve your dreams. It's achieving them and realizing you missed your entire life along the way. So yeah, next time you catch yourself saying, "I'll be happy when," stop, look at the sky, eat the pizza, and realize that you have already arrived. Let me know what you think. Are you caught on the achievement treadmill right now?