Repatriation, Cognitive Bias and my Aloha to Happiness.

It was February. I remember getting off the plane that night in Honolulu. There was a soft breeze which carried a sweet earthy fragrance. It was delightfully exotic to a Midwesterner!

Perhaps the scent came from the flower necklaces or lei given to some of the tourists arriving at the airport.

I reminded myself that I was not a tourist. I had come to find a job, one where I could leverage a valuable skill: my fluent Japanese.

After 4 challenging years in Osaka, I felt that it was time to move on. Unfortunately, I had no real clue WHERE TO GO and WHAT TO DO. Six months of job applications in the States only led to a few interviews. People were politely curious about my experience abroad but also puzzled if not suspicious.

When a friend told that there was a real shortage of bilinguals (English/Japanese) in Hawaii, I decided to take a chance. On a modest budget and a single business card in my pocket (a referral from a friend of a friend), I would check things out for myself.

Would it be easy? Of course not! Would I be lonely? Undoubtedly.... but I was much younger, optimistic and confident. The question I never asked myself was a complex and subjective one:

Would I be hap...hap...happy?

Below are the 2025 TOP TEN country rankings for Happiness - a somewhat arbitary classification to my mind as there are no criteria for defining a concept like happiness. With the exception of Luxembourg where I'm currently based, NONE of the countries where I have lived appear: the continental US, Germany, France, Japan and Mainland China.

As a coach specialised in expatriation, I immediately noticed the CULTURAL BIAS in the survey. Apparently, it is a greater challenge to be "happy" in Asia, Australia, Africa or South America....or maybe this only pertains to expats? Surely each culture has its own definition of what "happy" means!

The above report would also seem to suggest that geography/climate has NO significant influence on one's state of happiness - with 7 of the 10 countries located in central or northern Europe.

If I had seen the World Happiness Report 30 years ago, maybe I wouldn't have bought that one-way ticket to Hawaii. I bought into the idea that a new environment, a better climate and a job change would contribute to an ongoing sense of happiness.

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winning economist, psychologist and author of a landmark book called, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" identified this all too common misconception. He called it:

An Error of Affective Forecasting

In short, he discovered that this bias stems from flawed predictions about future emotions. Years of research led Kahneman to identify a key source of dissatisfaction: errors in affective forecasting.

This refers to the tendency to misjudge both the intensity and duration of our emotional responses to future events—whether positive or negative.

Kahneman argues that people routinely overestimate how strongly and how long they will feel a certain way. From lottery winners to newlyweds, most eventually return to their baseline level of happiness.

However interesting this theory may be, I have neither officially "tied the knot" nor won any significant sum of money, so the idea didn't fully resonate with me. Fortunately, Kahneman uses an anecdote from his personal life which did.

The author recalls an argument with his wife, who wanted the family to move from Princeton on the East Coast to California. She was convinced they would be happier there—but Kahneman disagreed. (Perhaps he had already seen the country rankings in the World Happiness Report!)

In 1998, Kahneman received research funding to investigate the issue with colleague David Schkade. Their findings were published in Psychological Science (Vol. 9, No. 5) under the title: “Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction.”

The results supported Kahneman’s view: climate had no significant effect on happiness or well-being. This held true for all participants—whether they lived in California or the Midwest.

Interestingly, the study also uncovered a broader insight: almost every participant overestimated the impact of weather on their overall satisfaction, falling prey to what Kahneman and Schkade called a “focusing illusion.”

This got me thinking. Perhaps the dream of a better life in a warmer climate is the effect of a collective cultural programming in the US conveyed through literature, cinema and popular music.

It took me 10 days to find a job in the Aloha State. Incidentally, Aloha is a word which means both "Hello" and "Goodbye".

It took me 10 weeks to get my first case of Island Fever (mental distress experienced by mainlanders) and come to the understanding that I was not suited to working in a bank.

In mid-April, to my great surprise, I received a letter from the French Consulate in Chicago informing me that my application for a short-term residency card (carte de séjour temporaire) would be delivered pending a few more documents. I resigned from the bank the following day. I then rented a car and explored the islands with the rest of my savings. I arrived in Paris that summer.

Although my suntan faded quickly, I held on to warm memories of the friendly locals, the beautiful beaches and one important lesson about... being happy.