The other day I saw an advert for a late-night event at the Oxford Museum of Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museum (my favourite place). Friday, 7pm till 10pm. Talks, stalls, demonstrations, live music, a cocktail bar among the dinosaurs and anthropology exhibits. My first thought was: that sounds amazing.
My second thought, almost immediately: Hang on. I don’t think I’d actually enjoy that. The crowds, the noise echoing round that glass roof, four hours on my feet at the end of the week. I could already picture myself at 9:30, frazzled and wanting to go home.
So why does the idea shine so much brighter than the reality? Psychology has some answers.
What the research says
Distance makes things abstract. Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman’s construal level theory shows that the further away something is, in time or imagination, the more abstractly we think about it. From a distance, I see “fascinating evening of ideas”. Up close, I see the queue for the toilets. Trope & Liberman, 2010
We expect more than we experience. Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson called this the “rosy view”: in their studies of holidays and a cycling tour, people’s expectations were more positive than the experience itself (and, interestingly, their memories became rosier again afterwards). Mitchell et al., 1997
We think future-us will have more energy. Gal Zauberman and John Lynch found people consistently believe they’ll have more spare time in the future than they do today, which is why we say yes now and dread it later. Zauberman & Lynch, 2005
The HSP twist
For us, of course, there’s an extra layer. The same depth of processing that makes an evening like this so appealing is what makes the reality so draining: the pull and the cost come from the same place. One finding I hadn’t come across before: a 2024 study found that SPS was linked to avoiding intensity, but not novelty (Watten et al., 2024). That was exactly me: I wanted the newness, not the noise.
Bridging the gap
So I’ve decided I might go after all, just not for four hours. I’ll arrive at 7 while it’s quiet, choose the one talk or gallery that really drew me in, and leave when I’ve had enough. Maybe an hour. And I’ll count that as a success, not as missing out.
The idea that lit me up was pointing at something real: my love of learning and wonder. I don’t have to choose between the whole evening and nothing.
Over to you: What have you loved the idea of but found too much in reality? And have you found a gentler way to enjoy it?