The paradise paradox

Prints

The Paradise Paradox is the tempting but misguided belief that moving to a "paradise" will magically make everything better. It's the idea that a change of scene to somewhere beautiful or exciting will somehow sweep away all our problems. And while a fresh setting can give us a lift, the reality is often more complicated: paradise, as wonderful as it might be, won't always solve the everyday challenges we bring along with us.

Idealizing Paradise

Moving to your paradise might feel incredible, and it's a life-changer for some people, but it's easy to idealize paradise, imagining it as a place where worries simply disappear. Yet even the most stunning places could start to feel ordinary, and your conceptualised paradise may have its own challenges.

For instance, perhaps your paradise is a beautiful, distant, exotic land. Such a paradise, however, has the drawback of no longer being distant or exotic once you arrive and the day-to-day takes over. Someone living in a fast-paced metropolis might dream of calm and quiet, while someone surrounded by calm and quiet may dream of the rush and excitement of the big city.

Alastair Humphreys, who introduced me to the Paradise Paradox in his book Local , gave a great example in our podcast about Microadventures . In an interview on an American podcast, the interviewers couldn't imagine exploring Kansas to be exciting—it was known or even home to them. But to Alastair, a visit to Kansas would be an adventure, full of new things to see and do. It's a reminder that our ideas of paradise are often fueled by novelty—and novelty, by nature, doesn't last forever.

Expectations, the day-to-day, and Adaptability

Some of the Paradise Paradox may be explained by how easy it is to build up expectations. If we imagine paradise as the ultimate fix, it could lead to disappointment if it doesn't live up to the dream. As for vorfreude—the joy of anticipation—the build-up can sometimes overshadow the reality.

Then there's the simple truth that day-to-day life in paradise isn't a vacation. A tropical beach holiday lets you unwind and enjoy the scenery without a care. But living there might mean dealing with rainy seasons, work deadlines, or just regular old laundry.

Humans are also remarkably adaptable. We're good at adjusting to new surroundings, which means something initially remarkable may soon become the new normal. It's a bit like the grass-is-greener mentality we see in many areas of life. If you're a consultant, you might long for the stability of an in-house role, while in-house folks might crave the variety of consulting.

The Dark Side of the Paradise Paradox

In some cases, the Paradise Paradox takes on a more serious tone. The documentary film The Paradise Paradox , executive produced by Olympic ski racer Bode Miller and filmmaker Brett Rapkin, explores how people drawn to the beauty and tranquility of US mountain towns sometimes face mental health struggles. These picturesque communities, though visually idyllic, have experienced higher-than-average rates of suicide, highlighting the challenges of living in remote, isolated settings.

Strategies to Minimize the Pull of the Paradise Paradox

To reduce the effect of the Paradise Paradox, it helps to focus on what brings fulfillment in any setting, allowing us to appreciate where we are without feeling the constant pull of an imagined paradise. Here are a few ways to lessen the allure:

1. Cultivating Gratitude

Practicing gratitude allows us to recognize the value of what we already have. Focusing on the positives around us may make us less inclined to search elsewhere for happiness, realizing that contentment often lies closer than we think.

2. Prioritizing Experiences Over Material Goods

Research consistently shows that experiences bring longer-lasting happiness than possessions. Prioritizing meaningful activities and memories can bring joy and satisfaction, outlasting the initial thrill of accumulating more.

3. Simplifying Life

A minimalist approach can help reduce the constant desire for more—whether it's things, places, or achievements. Simplifying our lives can allow us to focus on what truly matters and bring a greater sense of peace.

4. Pursuing Meaningful Goals

Focusing on personal growth, nurturing relationships, and contributing to our communities can offer a lasting sense of fulfillment that doesn't depend on our surroundings. Meaningful goals and connections often provide the depth of happiness that location alone can't bring.

Paradise can certainly refresh us, but true and lasting happiness is often about embracing where we already are and what we already have.

Since writing this I keep seeing related quotes:

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

— Robert M. Pirsig (via Waking Up )

“We tend to attribute happiness to our circumstances (what happens to us) but studies suggest our happiness is really dependent on what we pay attention to.”

— Cal Newport, Deep Work (via Mind Over Tech )

"Happiness isn't getting what you want, it's wanting what you got."

— Garth Brooks

Wherever you go, there you are.

Also see:

Published 10 Nov 2024

A weekly sketch by email

Learn something new in a sketch each Sunday

Sketchplanations in a book! I think you'll love Big Ideas Little Pictures

Prefer to listen?
Try the podcast

Like Sketchplanations?
Support me on Patreon

Keep exploring

Eponym

What is the Fun scale explained showing Type 1 fun as skiing, Type 2 fun as mountaineering and Type 3 fun as surviving a bear encounter (the best story)

The fun scale: understanding the types of fun

An eponym is a word named after somebody or someplace. An eponym, almost by definition, comes with a story, making them some of the most intriguing words. Knowing what an eponym is also allows you to use the word eponymous, which is always a good way to sound smart. Some of my favourite eponyms are now commonplace products that took the inventor's name. Some examples: The Rubik's Cube The Rubik's cube is an invention by Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik. The cube has the fascinating property of being a solid object that's also fluid. This year (2024), the Rubik's Cube turned 50, celebrating around half a billion cube sales, scores of speed-cubing championships, and documentaries. When Rubik first invented the cube, he wasn't sure it was solvable and only managed it for the first time several months after creating it. In 2020, Rubik told the story of the cube in his book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All. The Jacuzzi The fabulously named jacuzzi, or more generally the hot tub, is named after the Italian Jacuzzi family. The seven brothers of the family—there were also six daughters—trained to become engineers, making plane propellers, irrigation systems and pumps before one of the brothers created a homemade bath to help his two-year-old son who was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The rest, as they say, is history. Saskia Solomon tells some of the brothers' story, which includes the court case Jacuzzi vs Jacuzzi, and the invention of the jacuzzi in the 2023 New York Times article, The Frothy Saga of the Jacuzzi Family. The Sandwich After so long as what seems the most basic of foods, it was remarkable for me to learn that the humble sandwich was named after a person: John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Though he probably spent most of his time in London, the title itself is associated with the small town of Sandwich in Kent, in Southeast England. The story goes that the Earl liked playing cards and wanted food he could eat without having to leave his game and that wouldn't give him sticky fingers that would damage the cards. Incarnations of open sandwiches appeared much earlier elsewhere. For example, the trencher—something I had to look up when reading Game of Thrones—involved serving food on top of old bread as a sort of plate. But it took the Earl's dedication to card playing, or at least desk work, to take the next step many years later. The Biro and BiC ballpoint pens László Bíró was a Hungarian-Argentine inventor who created the first truly successful ballpoint pen. In the US, the BiC is more common, an eponym this time from Marcel Bich. It's said that Lázló experienced his fountain pen leaking from heat—fountain pens being very common before the ballpoint—and was inspired by a printing press that used a cylinder to spread the ink. All it needed was to go in all directions. Enter the ballpoint. While the invention seems obvious in hindsight, perfecting it for robust, commercial use was challenging. For example, finding suitable ink for the tiny ball bearing to spread, which doesn't leak or clog and isn't overly affected by heat. Lázló teamed up with an aviation company—who use a lot of ball bearings—which also provided a great use case of finding a pen that wouldn't leak from the air pressure changes in planes. Later, BiC licenced the technology from Biro. A Bic Cristal® Ballpoint pen is part of the collection at the MoMA. Silhouette I only learned that silhouette was an eponym while preparing this sketch, but it's perhaps the best of all. Étienne de Silhouette, a French government finance official tasked with curbing a French deficit in the 1700s, unwittingly gave his name to the classic black-on-white simple outline image of a person. His severe frugal policies of taxes, curbing royal spending and even melting down gold and silverware earned him the reputation of doing things cheaply. Hence, a cheap method of creating a portrait, cutting out black paper and laying it on a white background, became known as a silhouette. Diesel Nearly everyone will recognise the fuel that Rudolf Diesel gave his name to and his diesel engine. Diesel created a breakthrough engine that was more efficient than typical steam engines while being smaller and weighing less. Curiously, I learned that Diesel died in mysterious circumstances, disappearing on a journey across the English Channel in 1913. -- An excellent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast featuring Helen Zaltzman of the Allusionist raised several interesting questions about eponyms I hadn't considered. Here are a few to think about: Eponyms are common in medicine, for example, when we name a disease or condition after those playing a part in the discovery. However, the name, for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, tells a medical practitioner very little about the disease compared to a name that relates to the symptoms of the sufferer or the cause. Should examples like these be replaced with more practical names? Eponyms almost always have a way of oversimplifying a story, often wrapping up complex histories with the names of white males. For example, rarely are products invented or diseases identified solely through the actions of one person. Yet an eponym chooses one, or some people, at the expense of others. Eponyms may be the name of someone later discredited or who develops a tarnished reputation from other actions in their lives. Should someone who did evil deeds be remembered in an eponym or should it be changed? Who knew eponyms could be so interesting? Know some good eponyms with fun stories? I'd love to hear them. Eponyms are distinct from the fun concept of Nominative determinism—an aptronym—where someone's name seemingly influenced their future actions or career choices (for example, Les McBurney — Volunteer firefighter). I've covered a lot of eponyms over the years, far more than I realised. Using the handy list page on the site, I've collected some other eponym examples, which include a lot of my favourites: Bloom's Taxonomy Bortle Scale Braille Campbell's law Chesterton's fence Conway's Law Dracula sneeze Dunbar's number: 150 Fahrenheit and Celsius Fitts' Law Goldilocks tasks Goodhart's Law Hanlon's Razor Hofstadter's Law Identify a Douglas fir Jevon's Paradox Johari window Koomey's Law The Kano model Marchetti's constant Maslow's hierarchy of needs Metcalfe's Law Möbius strip Moore's Law Muphry's Law Pyrrhic victory Russell's Teapot Sankey diagram Scoville scale Spoonerisms Strahler stream order The Abilene paradox The Barnum effect The Betty Crocker Effect The Boaty McBoatface effect The Diderot Effect The Doppler Effect The Droste effect The Feynman Learning Technique The Gartner Hype cycle The Generalised Peter Principle The Gini coefficient The Goldilocks Zone The IKEA effect The Keeling curve The Lake Wobegon Effect The Lucretius problem The Mercator projection The Monty Hall problem The Overton Window The Oxford comma The Peter Principle The Plimsoll line The Pomodoro Technique ® The Rashomon effect The Rosetta Stone The Shirky Principle The Streisand Effect The Stroop test Veblen goods Other fun -onym words about words: Acronyms and initialisms Capitonym Heteronym Homonyms, homographs, homophones… …An eponym is a word named after somebody or someplace. An eponym, almost by definition, comes with a story, making them some of the most intriguing words. Knowing what an eponym is also allows you to use the word eponymous, which is always a good way to sound smart. Some of my favourite eponyms are now commonplace products that took the inventor's name. Some examples: The Rubik's Cube The Rubik's cube is an invention by Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik. The cube has the fascinating property of being a solid object that's also fluid. This year (2024), the Rubik's Cube turned 50, celebrating around half a billion cube sales, scores of speed-cubing championships, and documentaries. When Rubik first invented the cube, he wasn't sure it was solvable and only managed it for the first time several months after creating it. In 2020, Rubik told the story of the cube in his book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All. The Jacuzzi The fabulously named jacuzzi, or more generally the hot tub, is named after the Italian Jacuzzi family. The seven brothers of the family—there were also six daughters—trained to become engineers, making plane propellers, irrigation systems and pumps before one of the brothers created a homemade bath to help his two-year-old son who was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The rest, as they say, is history. Saskia Solomon tells some of the brothers' story, which includes the court case Jacuzzi vs Jacuzzi, and the invention of the jacuzzi in the 2023 New York Times article, The Frothy Saga of the Jacuzzi Family. The Sandwich After so long as what seems the most basic of foods, it was remarkable for me to learn that the humble sandwich was named after a person: John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Though he probably spent most of his time in London, the title itself is associated with the small town of Sandwich in Kent, in Southeast England. The story goes that the Earl liked playing cards and wanted food he could eat without having to leave his game and that wouldn't give him sticky fingers that would damage the cards. Incarnations of open sandwiches appeared much earlier elsewhere. For example, the trencher—something I had to look up when reading Game of Thrones—involved serving food on top of old bread as a sort of plate. But it took the Earl's dedication to card playing, or at least desk work, to take the next step many years later. The Biro and BiC ballpoint pens László Bíró was a Hungarian-Argentine inventor who created the first truly successful ballpoint pen. In the US, the BiC is more common, an eponym this time from Marcel Bich. It's said that Lázló experienced his fountain pen leaking from heat—fountain pens being very common before the ballpoint—and was inspired by a printing press that used a cylinder to spread the ink. All it needed was to go in all directions. Enter the ballpoint. While the invention seems obvious in hindsight, perfecting it for robust, commercial use was challenging. For example, finding suitable ink for the tiny ball bearing to spread, which doesn't leak or clog and isn't overly affected by heat. Lázló teamed up with an aviation company—who use a lot of ball bearings—which also provided a great use case of finding a pen that wouldn't leak from the air pressure changes in planes. Later, BiC licenced the technology from Biro. A Bic Cristal® Ballpoint pen is part of the collection at the MoMA. Silhouette I only learned that silhouette was an eponym while preparing this sketch, but it's perhaps the best of all. Étienne de Silhouette, a French government finance official tasked with curbing a French deficit in the 1700s, unwittingly gave his name to the classic black-on-white simple outline image of a person. His severe frugal policies of taxes, curbing royal spending and even melting down gold and silverware earned him the reputation of doing things cheaply. Hence, a cheap method of creating a portrait, cutting out black paper and laying it on a white background, became known as a silhouette. Diesel Nearly everyone will recognise the fuel that Rudolf Diesel gave his name to and his diesel engine. Diesel created a breakthrough engine that was more efficient than typical steam engines while being smaller and weighing less. Curiously, I learned that Diesel died in mysterious circumstances, disappearing on a journey across the English Channel in 1913. -- An excellent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast featuring Helen Zaltzman of the Allusionist raised several interesting questions about eponyms I hadn't considered. Here are a few to think about: Eponyms are common in medicine, for example, when we name a disease or condition after those playing a part in the discovery. However, the name, for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, tells a medical practitioner very little about the disease compared to a name that relates to the symptoms of the sufferer or the cause. Should examples like these be replaced with more practical names? Eponyms almost always have a way of oversimplifying a story, often wrapping up complex histories with the names of white males. For example, rarely are products invented or diseases identified solely through the actions of one person. Yet an eponym chooses one, or some people, at the expense of others. Eponyms may be the name of someone later discredited or who develops a tarnished reputation from other actions in their lives. Should someone who did evil deeds be remembered in an eponym or should it be changed? Who knew eponyms could be so interesting? Know some good eponyms with fun stories? I'd love to hear them. Eponyms are distinct from the fun concept of Nominative determinism—an aptronym—where someone's name seemingly influenced their future actions or career choices (for example, Les McBurney — Volunteer firefighter). I've covered a lot of eponyms over the years, far more than I realised. Using the handy list page on the site, I've collected some other eponym examples, which include a lot of my favourites: Bloom's Taxonomy Bortle Scale Braille Campbell's law Chesterton's fence Conway's Law Dracula sneeze Dunbar's number: 150 Fahrenheit and Celsius Fitts' Law Goldilocks tasks Goodhart's Law Hanlon's Razor Hofstadter's Law Identify a Douglas fir Jevon's Paradox Johari window Koomey's Law The Kano model Marchetti's constant Maslow's hierarchy of needs Metcalfe's Law Möbius strip Moore's Law Muphry's Law Pyrrhic victory Russell's Teapot Sankey diagram Scoville scale Spoonerisms Strahler stream order The Abilene paradox The Barnum effect The Betty Crocker Effect The Boaty McBoatface effect The Diderot Effect The Doppler Effect The Droste effect The Feynman Learning Technique The Gartner Hype cycle The Generalised Peter Principle The Gini coefficient The Goldilocks Zone The IKEA effect The Keeling curve The Lake Wobegon Effect The Lucretius problem The Mercator projection The Monty Hall problem The Overton Window The Oxford comma The Peter Principle The Plimsoll line The Pomodoro Technique ® The Rashomon effect The Rosetta Stone The Shirky Principle The Streisand Effect The Stroop test Veblen goods Other fun -onym words about words: Acronyms and initialisms Capitonym Heteronym Homonyms, homographs, homophones…

Newer

RRandom

Older