People generally like to feel happy, try to feel happy, and want to be happier even if they are already fairly happy. A large set of international data showed that about 70% of people rated happiness as important, and only 1% reported that they had never thought about happiness (Diener, 2000), and many people report that they want to be happier than they already are (Myers, 2000; Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006). Happiness is positive and, as a result, can be seen as a goal insofar as people actively work toward the continued experience of such positivity (Tsai et al., 2006). However, pursuing happiness comes with significant costs (Gruber, Mauss, & Tamir, 2011), including loneliness (Mauss et al., 2012) and the aforementioned paradoxical reduction in happiness itself (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, & Savino, 2011). This is because trying to be happier often leads people to monitor not only happy thoughts but also unhappy thoughts at the same time, and the ironic salience of this negativity makes them feel unhappier (Schooler & Mauss, 2010; Wegner, 1994). The present investigation proposes to add yet another item to this list of the downsides of happiness: feelings of time scarcity.

According to models of goal pursuit, people set and pursue a desired outcome, and making progress toward this goal state requires effortful action in order to ultimately achieve the goal (Carver & Scheier, 1999). In general, people make advances toward achieving a goal to some extent during their pursuit of it. Although people may fail to achieve it to the extent that they want, or might make advances toward it more slowly than intended, this does not necessarily compromise the original state. The author who initially sought to write five pages in a day, finding at midnight that only two pages have been written, has still made progress toward a set writing goal, and no movement has occurred in a counterproductive direction (i.e., no pages usually have been deleted). However, the unique pursuit of happiness may well impair the original state: Setting out to achieve happiness that exceeds one’s original level might instead decrease happiness relative to the happiness characterizing the original state (i.e., before initiating the pursuit of happiness). This means that an effort to achieve greater happiness not only might fail to increase happiness but it also may well decrease it. We posit that this may call to mind the requirement of consistent future effort needing to be deployed in order to reduce the gap between the desired state and the actual state. As such, with the anticipated need for future effort comes an anticipated increase in demands on one’s time.