Most of us run a small piece of logic without ever saying it out loud. Get the inbox down, then relax. Finish the degree, then breathe. Clear the mortgage, land the promotion, get the kids through school, and then, at last, the good part starts.

Enjoyment gets filed as something you earn, a payment released only when everything else is done.

The trouble is that the list of things to finish first never ends, so the payment keeps getting pushed back. The philosopher Alan Watts thought this arrangement wasn’t just tiring. He thought it was an error, built into how we’re taught to live.

We’re not psychologists or therapists, and what follows is our reading of one philosopher’s argument alongside a little research, not advice for how you should run your own life. The studies mentioned describe patterns across groups of people, not verdicts about any one reader.

The reward we keep postponing

The pattern is easy to spot once you name it. We treat the present moment as a corridor to somewhere better, a place we pass through on the way to the room where life really happens. School exists to get us to a good job. The job exists to get us to a comfortable retirement.

Each stage is justified by the one after it, and the doing itself is never quite allowed to count.

Modern psychology has a name for the disappointment waiting at the end of that chain. Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard-trained psychologist, called it the arrival fallacy. Psychology Today describes it as the false belief that reaching a specific goal will bring lasting satisfaction. Hitting the goal can give you a real but temporary sense of accomplishment, that same piece notes, but the happiness you expected fades fast.

You get the thing, feel good for an afternoon, and then you’re back where you started, already scanning for the next finish line.

What Watts actually said

Watts made the point decades earlier, and he made it as a musician might.

In his “Coincidence of Opposites” talk, he compared the way we treat life with the way we listen to a song. Watts put it like this: “When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition.” Nobody rushes a symphony to reach the final bar sooner. The point of the music is the music, happening now, note by note.

Life, in his view, had been miscast as travel when it was really more like the song. Watts argued that “we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

Set that next to the arrival fallacy and the two ideas rhyme, one from a lecture hall in the 1960s, one from a positive-psychology classroom. 

Why the destination mindset backfires

Perhaps the sharpest part of Watts’s argument is what happens when you actually win. He sketched the person who did everything right, climbed every rung, and then reaches the top: “Then you wake up one day about 40 years old and you say, ‘My God, I’ve arrived. I’m there.’ And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt.” The arrival that was supposed to change everything changes almost nothing. 

His conclusion was blunt. Watts suggested that “we simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line.” That’s a provocation, not a proof, and it lands hardest as a warning rather than a measurement of anyone’s actual life. But the mechanism he’s pointing at is real enough. If enjoyment is only ever the reward for finishing, and there is always something else to finish, then the reward is always just out of reach. You spend the whole song waiting for it to be over so the good part can begin.

Where goals still earn their keep

It would be easy to read all this as a case against ambition, and that’s where we think the argument needs its honest limits drawn.

Neither Watts’s dance nor the research says goals are the enemy. Ben-Shahar is clear that having objectives is essential to growth. A life with no ends at all isn’t a symphony. It’s noise.

There’s also a body of work on the other side. Fred Bryant, whom the Greater Good Science Center calls the father of research on savoring, and his co-author Joseph Veroff define savoring as attending to, appreciating, and enhancing the good experiences in our lives. The benefit comes from the attending itself, not just from having something nice to attend to.

In one study, people who took a 20-minute daily walk for a week while deliberately looking for good things felt happier than those told to look for bad things. It was a small, week-long study rather than a life plan, so it’s best read as a clue about attention rather than a rule about happiness. But it points the same way Watts did. The material for enjoyment is usually already present. What’s missing is the noticing.

How we’ve come to read it

What we keep coming back to is that the fix isn’t to abandon the finish lines. It’s to stop treating the stretch between them as a waiting room.

The goal can stay on the calendar. The promotion, the house, the finished project, all of it can remain something you’re genuinely working toward. What Watts was after, as far as we can tell, is refusing to let those ends quietly repossess every ordinary hour that isn’t one of them.

You don’t have to choose between having somewhere to go and being somewhere while you go there. The reward was never scheduled for later. It’s been playing the whole time.

If the feeling of always waiting for life to start lands close to home, a qualified counsellor or therapist is a good person to talk it through with.