Why Does Anticipation Sometimes Feel Better Than the Thing Itself?

You’ve spent months imagining the vacation. You’ve pictured it, planned it, looked forward to it through bad weeks and long meetings. The anticipation alone was almost pleasurable.

Then you’re there, and something is slightly off. The hotel is fine. The city is nice. But the experience doesn’t quite match the version you had been living in your head.

This is not a personal failing or ingratitude. It’s a known asymmetry in how the brain processes wanting versus having — and it has a specific neurological basis.

Wanting Is Not the Same as Liking

The key insight comes from research by Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan, who spent years studying reward systems in rats.

Berridge made a discovery that disrupted the standard model of dopamine as the “pleasure chemical.” He found that blocking dopamine in rats’ brains — completely — did not eliminate their enjoyment of pleasurable things. Rats with no dopamine activity would still show positive facial expressions and consume food placed directly in their mouths. They liked things.

But the same dopamine-depleted rats would not move toward food. They would not seek, approach, or work for rewards. They wanted nothing.

The conclusion: wanting and liking are separate systems.

Dopamine, it turns out, drives wanting — the motivational urge to seek, approach, and pursue rewards. The hedonic experience of liking — the pleasure itself when you have the thing — runs on different circuits, primarily opioid-mediated pathways in the nucleus accumbens.

You can want intensely and like moderately. You can want something you know you won’t enjoy. And the wanting can feel more intense than the having, because dopamine is a more motivating system than the opioid pleasure system.

Schultz’s Prediction Error

Wolfram Schultz at Cambridge made a related discovery in the 1990s that explains the shape of anticipation.

He was recording from individual dopamine neurons in monkeys while they received unexpected food rewards. The initial finding was expected: dopamine neurons fired when the monkey received unexpected food.

But then something strange happened as the experiment continued. As the monkeys learned that a light signaled incoming food, the dopamine response shifted. The neurons stopped firing when the food arrived — and started firing when the light appeared. The dopamine peak moved from the reward to the predictor of the reward.

And if the light appeared but no food followed, the dopamine neurons showed a dip below baseline at the moment the food would have arrived.

This is the reward prediction error mechanism: dopamine neurons fire to unexpected rewards and to cues that reliably predict rewards, and they dip when an expected reward fails to arrive.

The implication: the dopamine signal — the wanting — is maximal during anticipation, when the reward is expected and imminent but not yet received. Once the reward arrives and is no longer novel or unexpected, the prediction error is zero, and the dopamine signal falls.

The Arriving Problem

This is why arrival so often disappoints.

The planning phase of a vacation activates anticipation circuits. Each time you think about it, look up restaurants, imagine the experience, your dopamine system is firing to the cue (the upcoming trip). This can happen over months, accumulating the feeling of wanting.

The trip itself, once it arrives, is no longer a prediction — it’s a reality. The prediction error signal drops. If the trip is approximately what you expected, the dopamine neurons register no surprise. If it’s worse than expected, they dip below baseline. Only if the trip exceeds your expectations does the dopamine system respond as it did to the initial planning.

This asymmetry — that novelty and anticipation drive stronger dopamine responses than fulfillment — means that any experience you have extensively imagined before having it will face a structural disadvantage. Your dopamine system has already been rewarded by the anticipation. The thing itself is arriving into a baseline that the imagination has already partially used up.

The Wanting Machine

Berridge’s framing is worth sitting with: the wanting system is more powerful as a motivational force than the liking system is as a satisfying one.

This is useful for survival. You need to pursue food more urgently than you need to enjoy it. The wanting drives behavior; the liking registers the outcome. An asymmetry in their intensity makes evolutionary sense — better to want things more desperately than you end up enjoying them than to be insufficiently motivated to pursue them.

But in modern life, this asymmetry can feel like a trap. The wanting for a purchase, a goal, a relationship is intense and sustained. The satisfaction on arrival is comparatively brief. The wanting for the next thing begins almost immediately.

This is not a malfunction. It is the system working as designed — to keep you seeking, pursuing, and motivated toward the next reward. The system doesn’t care that you’re already comfortable.

Why This Doesn’t Mean Anticipation Is Better

The wanting-liking distinction doesn’t mean you should stay in perpetual anticipation and avoid having things. The wanting system isn’t enjoyable in the way the liking system is — it’s motivating. The urgency of wanting something is not the same as the pleasure of having it; it’s often uncomfortable, a kind of productive restlessness.

What the research does suggest: the moments of genuine, present enjoyment — liking, in Berridge’s terms — are quieter than the wanting that precedes them, and briefer, and often overlooked in retrospect because the wanting phase was louder.

The vacation was probably good. You were probably there and liking it in real time. The memory gets filtered through the gap between the anticipated version and the actual version, and the wanting that preceded it was louder than what it got.

The meal was good too. The wanting just prepared you for something else.

Two systems. Different chemicals. Different intensities.

The dopamine wants. The opioids like. And the dopamine is louder.