The work also extended beyond animal care; one of my tasks was to clean the public toilets. Was it my dream job? No. And, my experience was more common than you’d think. It turns out, we often fail to think about the tedious minutia that is likely to be involved in what we consider to be our ideal job and how it might fall short of our expectations. In fact, psychologists even have a name for it: “affective forecasting”. What this means is we often have an unrealistic hopefulness that new situations will make us feel significantly different in a grass-is-always-greener mentality.

Affective forecasting, according to Lisa A Williams, a professor of psychology at University of New South Wales in Sydney, is “how people predict they will feel” in a particular circumstance. “A classic example is winning the lottery. People anticipate that winning the lottery will bring immense joy. But when researchers actually study the happiness levels of lottery winners they find that it lasts a fairly short amount of time,” she says.

In my case, it meant that I was letting my emotions play out my future: thinking about spending time with fascinating animals and not the manual work. And, while we're often encouraged to get a job doing what we love, the downside is that maybe we just like the idea, not the reality.

Fooling ourselves

That was certainly the case for Sue Arnold, 46, who had long-held aspirations of becoming an archaeologist. Arnold, a secretary in finance in London, describes how she loved the classic films about Tutankhamen and the race to discover the tombs of the pharaohs in Ancient Egypt. With this in mind, she signed up for an archaeological dig to uncover Roman ruins in Dorset, in the UK.