mind=body=soul

Its a common sense that happiness out of doing
something is affected by the expectation of doing it, prior to actually doing it.
But how much is the expectation contributing to the actual happiness than the actual 'thing' itself?
I think expectation plays an even bigger role(not just a small role) than the act itself.

For eg, a person maybe thinking that he'll be happy if he gets a new car or a house. But after he gets that, the happiness he gets out of it was probably dictated *more* by the expectations and perceived notions prior to getting the car than the actual happiness derived out of its possession. Hence the happiness will last only shorter and probably cause disappointments caused due to expectations.

So, key to happiness is to play with your expectations. (this was probably obvious but we might have underestimated the role of expectations in happiness). Going by this I think, people who do a lot of planning ahead or organized could be less happy in general.

We could try to play with expectations slowly. For eg, when choosing a movie, don't try to chose a movie based on reviews,plot or asking friends. Most of the times, when you hear lot of good things about the movie you are surely not going to like it as much if you had chosen the movie by random. If you see movies at random, you will also end up with a lot of bad ones which may make you appreciate the good movies even better, which brings up another theory that, in order to be happy u also have to be (or expect) sad many times.