Feel Empty After Achieving a Goal? What Lottery Winners Reveal
Feel Empty After Achieving a Goal? What Lottery Winners Reveal
The email lands at 4:52 on a Friday. You got the promotion you'd been chasing for two years. By 5:15 the team channel is a wall of confetti emojis, and someone is already organizing drinks. Saturday you sleep in, pleased with yourself in a way you haven't been in months.
Sunday night, a little after eleven, you notice what you're doing. You're scrolling job postings one level up. The new title already feels like the floor.
Nothing went wrong. The promotion is real. You didn't suddenly turn ungrateful. So why can you feel empty after achieving a goal you wanted that badly?
I made that scene up. The confusion behind it is mine.
What is satisfaction, and what is success? I want new things. I'd like my life to be a little more comfortable. I want the people around me to think well of me.
Put all of that under one heading, "I want to succeed," and I sometimes lose track of what I'm actually after. A better life? Recognition? Or, measuring myself against everyone else, just not falling behind?
I can't tell whether this is plain greed or my own insecurity talking. And I keep wondering whether I'm the only one who thinks this way.
Never Happy With Your Achievements? A Working Theory
It turns out I'm not the only one wondering. On Reddit, I found several strangers asking some version of the same question, like "Why Am I never happy about my accomplishments?"
My working theory: you can feel empty after achieving a goal because the word "success" bundles at least three different hopes — a better life, other people's recognition, and not falling behind. Landing one doesn't guarantee it will feel the way you expected.
Theory in hand, let's take the suspects one at a time, starting with the obvious one: maybe the win just wasn't big enough. The best evidence on that starts with a letter.
Lottery Winners and Life Satisfaction: A Letter That Never Said "Lottery"
Statistics Sweden sent out a questionnaire in the early fall of 2016, addressed to players selected for research. Each one came with a gift certificate worth 100 kronor and an envelope for sending it back.
The invitation never used the word lottery. That was deliberate. The researchers didn't want people guessing what the study was about and answering to fit.
Imagine being on the receiving end. Questions about how your life is going and how you feel, a little something for your trouble, and not one word about why you, of all people, were chosen.
Maybe a ticket you bought years ago changed everything. Maybe it covered a long weekend. Maybe it was a dud.
In the real sample, some had won a large prize five to twenty-two years earlier. Others had won small prizes, or nothing at all.
Lindqvist and colleagues analyzed 3,362 responses. On life satisfaction, the big winners came out ahead, and the gain showed no sign of fading after more than a decade. On happiness, the estimated effect was too small to tell apart from zero. The mental-health measures looked much the same.
That gap is the heart of this whole question. You can look at your life, honestly rate it higher, and still not feel any different.
It also puts the most famous lottery study in a new light. In 1978, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman compared 22 big winners with 22 people who hadn't won. The winners weren't happier, and they enjoyed everyday things less.
That study was small, and it never followed anyone from before the win to after it. Even so, it became the source of a line that still gets quoted: winners end up right back where they started. The Swedish data roughly agrees with it on happiness. It's the life-satisfaction question that gets a different answer.
Neither one is about a promotion or anything else you earn, and nothing I found checks whether a hard-won goal splits the same way. Together, they suggest that a bigger windfall didn't translate into a better mood. If that holds for earned wins too, size alone probably isn't the culprit.
Is Wanting More Money Just Greed? The $75,000 Question
That leaves the suspect from my own opening: plain greed. If money doesn't reliably make you happier, why keep wanting more of it?
The number people love to quote is $75,000, the annual household income past which money supposedly stops lifting your mood. It traces to a 2010 paper by Kahneman and Deaton, based on a U.S. survey about the previous day's feelings.
Eleven years later, Killingsworth came at it differently. Picture your phone buzzing at some random moment, maybe mid-meeting, with one question: "How do you feel right now?" His study did exactly that to employed Americans, over and over, and found no ceiling.
Two studies, two results that couldn't both be right. In 2023, Killingsworth and Kahneman reanalyzed the data together with Barbara Mellers, and each turned out to be partly right.
For most respondents, in-the-moment happiness kept climbing with income. It flattened only among roughly the unhappiest 15 to 20 percent, above about $100,000 a year. The researchers suggest why: some miseries, such as heartbreak or bereavement, may be the kind a bigger income can't touch.
Those are surveys, so they show money and mood moving together, not one causing the other. A 2022 experiment got closer to cause by handing out cash at random: 200 people got $10,000 each and three months to spend it.
Compared with a control group, they ended up more satisfied with life and in better spirits during that stretch, a far shorter window than the Swedish survey's. A further analysis found the lift was larger for people earning less.
That is why I'm wary of calling all of this greed. Wanting more money means one thing when the worry is rent and groceries, and something else when the worry is being seen as enough.
Which still doesn't explain Sunday night.
Why the Finish Line Moves After You Reach a Goal
So why does the glow fade even when the gain is real? The most direct explanation I came across is in a 2012 study by Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, which tracked 481 students over three months. Its starting point is blunt: the lift from a success doesn't hold on its own.
Their model names two routes. The first is the one everyone expects: the good feelings a change brings wear off as it becomes normal. The second is sneakier: your expectations climb, and you start wanting even more. The data supported the model's predictions.
The same study also pointed to two things linked with making the boost last longer: continuing to appreciate the change, and keeping some variety in what it brought.
That second route is Sunday night.
I can't prove that's what happens after a real one, but of everything I read, it fits best.
Other people can move the bar too. Scroll past a friend's new kitchen and a former coworker's promotion, and what you wanted last week can start to look modest before you've put the phone down.
I assumed that kind of comparison always stings. It doesn't, quite. A 2023 review of social media studies found that looking up at people who seem better off was tied to envy. But it could also bring admiration, optimism, and inspiration, especially when the gap felt within reach.
The way I read it, the same scroll can leave you smaller or pull you forward, depending on whether the person on the screen looks like a rival or a preview.
What I'm Left Asking
Back to Sunday night, then. Look at that scene again and all three hopes from my working theory are in it: the promotion itself, the confetti in the team channel, and the job postings one level up. The first two arrived on Friday. The third is the hard one to satisfy, because it's measured against a bar that keeps moving.
What I need to watch for isn't the wish for a better life. It's comparing myself with other people before I even know what I want, then feeling smug when I'm ahead or running myself down when I'm behind.
Before I wish for success, I'd like to ask what I actually need right now. Breathing room in my life? Someone's recognition? Or confirmation that I'm better than somebody else? Telling those apart is probably where the satisfaction I'm looking for begins.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between life satisfaction and happiness?
Life satisfaction is how you rate your life as a whole. Happiness, as studies like these measure it, sits closer to how you feel. The 2010 Kahneman and Deaton paper put the split in its title: higher income improved people's evaluation of their lives, but not their emotional well-being past a point.
Is feeling empty after achieving a goal a sign of depression?
Not by itself. A win that feels smaller than expected is different from losing interest in most things. The National Institute of Mental Health's guidance on depression treats a persistent loss of interest in daily activities, together with other symptoms, as something worth having evaluated by a professional.
Does hedonic adaptation mean happiness always returns to baseline?
No. The APA Dictionary of Psychology's entry on the hedonic treadmill, as the idea is often called, describes it as a hypothesis about a tendency. It also notes that people do not always return to their original happiness level.
Sources & References
- Forum post: r/ImposterSyndrome, "Why Am I never happy about my accomplishments?"
- Lindqvist, Östling, and Cesarini (2020), "Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being": Review of Economic Studies
- Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman (1978), "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?": PubMed
- Kahneman and Deaton (2010), "High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being": PubMed
- Killingsworth (2021), "Experienced Well-Being Rises with Income, Even Above $75,000 per Year": PubMed
- Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers (2023), "Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved": PMC
- Dwyer and Dunn (2022), "Wealth Redistribution Promotes Happiness": PNAS
- Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2012), "The Challenge of Staying Happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model": PubMed
- Carraturo and colleagues (2023), "Envy, Social Comparison, and Depression on Social Networking Sites: A Systematic Review": PMC
- American Psychological Association, APA Dictionary of Psychology, "hedonic treadmill": APA Dictionary
- National Institute of Mental Health, "Depression": NIMH
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