I recently learned about a study that cited how people seem to most ‘happiest’ right before vacation and start getting sad in the middle of it as they dread having to return from vacation. Apparently, there is a similar study about wine as well where people are happier when they are about to open the wine than when they drink it.

It’s the forward-looking anticipation for a positive event. Where one is not merely hoping for a good outcome but is expecting a good outcome as they open the wine or arrive at the airport to fly to a new city.

But what if the entire experiment is based on people who hate what they do and seek escape through means of a vacation or bottle of wine? Isn’t the innate problem that an unhappy person would forcibly create a cycle of expecting something and then broadcast cynicism to the next thing that they have low expectations of (i.e. returning to work)?

Instead of accepting the nomenclature that people are happier before going on a vacation and aren’t as happy in the middle of it, the focus might be better off on how one can change that behaviour instead of saying “this is so and cannot be changed”. This may result in moving away from the view of ‘people don’t really care for vacation’ to ‘man people hate what they do’.

Hence, the focus should be on how we can help individuals learn to build and design a life they can be happy in. To then see if a positive environment leads to these individuals getting even happier midway into a vacation because they use vacation as a way of recharging and now they are ready to come back stronger to work. They may anticipate the vacation but also anticipate the opportunity to get back to what they love while in the middle of the vacation.

It seems rather plausible. I’ve had coworkers who love what they do tell me how they look forward to the end of a vacation because they can’t wait to get back to their job. A skeptic, pessimist, and cynic would say that’s too good to be true and not something one can trust. But then again, why trust a pessimist? After the survival thing has been dealt with, pessimists only seem smart from screaming “I told you so” but that’s not very valuable. Rather, moving closer to the path of a rational optimist would seem more prudent. If that means I may overshoot and be an irrational optimist, it’s still a better person to be around than a pessimist of any sort.

All to say, if one grabbed a bunch of people who disliked what they do for a living (which seems to be most people) and if you asked them about how they felt during their vacations….the problem isn’t that people end up sad mid vacation but that most people dislike what they do.

The takeaway is not to generalize that people are sad midway through vacation and but that an underlying problem might be that people might hate what they do so how can we fix that? What’s the underlying problem? The job? Their attitude? Their beliefs? Their social circle? Seems worth it for every individual to see if how their own expectations change throughout a vacation to get a glimpse to their own life.