Empty
"Finally" finished my (hopefully the last) GRE test this morning. I think I am supposed to be relieved, but I really do not have the "finally!" feeling.
Rather I feel rather "empty," not to a very serious degree but just a mild feeling. Though by no means GRE is the last part of everything in my grad school applications, the feeling of unrealness already diffused throughout my mind.
In the test there were some truly random questions, those I would have never got them right even if I thoroughly reviewed every bit of the course materials in my psychology training last year. I feel that I did not do very well but experience told me that I usually underestimated my scores. I hope that is also the case this time. Anyway, my mind hasn't really been in that since the test was over this afternoon.
Conventional psychology says that we humans are pretty bad in predicting our mood, from predicting how happy one might be after getting a longly yearned product to the mood change after one's marriage. Despite the fact that I did much much better than I had expected in the GRE general test, my "happiness" did not last very long, I did raised my arms and said "YES!!!" to myself right after knowing the fact. Nonetheless, the duration of the sense of happiness/joy was horribly short, probably in minutes, a sharp contrast to the hundreds of hours I spent on prepaing the test, if not more than a thousand. Then it quickly regressed back to the mean, the neutral mood, and the mind started to think of "what is next?"
So what's the deal here? Things that I work so hard on, with the possibility of utter failure, and the happy feeling is so short? Where in the balance sheet did it debit such happy feeling? What would truly make me happy for a longer period of time at a sustainable higher "level?" Now I can't help but think of the human happiness research conducted by a UC Irvine professor. If it really works, she might get a nobel prize for that.
Rather I feel rather "empty," not to a very serious degree but just a mild feeling. Though by no means GRE is the last part of everything in my grad school applications, the feeling of unrealness already diffused throughout my mind.
In the test there were some truly random questions, those I would have never got them right even if I thoroughly reviewed every bit of the course materials in my psychology training last year. I feel that I did not do very well but experience told me that I usually underestimated my scores. I hope that is also the case this time. Anyway, my mind hasn't really been in that since the test was over this afternoon.
Conventional psychology says that we humans are pretty bad in predicting our mood, from predicting how happy one might be after getting a longly yearned product to the mood change after one's marriage. Despite the fact that I did much much better than I had expected in the GRE general test, my "happiness" did not last very long, I did raised my arms and said "YES!!!" to myself right after knowing the fact. Nonetheless, the duration of the sense of happiness/joy was horribly short, probably in minutes, a sharp contrast to the hundreds of hours I spent on prepaing the test, if not more than a thousand. Then it quickly regressed back to the mean, the neutral mood, and the mind started to think of "what is next?"
So what's the deal here? Things that I work so hard on, with the possibility of utter failure, and the happy feeling is so short? Where in the balance sheet did it debit such happy feeling? What would truly make me happy for a longer period of time at a sustainable higher "level?" Now I can't help but think of the human happiness research conducted by a UC Irvine professor. If it really works, she might get a nobel prize for that.
posted by Hootie at
11:36 PM
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