““People were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were dong, while they were at work than during their leisure hours. In their free time, they tended to feel bored and anxious. And yet they didn't like to be at work. When they were on the job, they expressed a strong desire to be off the job, and when they were off the job, the last thing they wanted was to go back to work. 'We have,' reported Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, 'the paradoxical situation of people having many more positive feelings at work than in leisure, yet saying that they 'wish to be doing something else' when they are at work, not when they are in leisure.' We're terrible, the experiment revealed, at anticipating which activities will satisfy us and which will leave us discontented. Even when we're in the midst of doing something, we don't seem able to judge its psychic consequences accurately. Those are symptoms of a more general affliction, on which psychologists have bestowed the poetic name miswanting. We're inclined to desire things we don't like and to like things we don't desire.””
