Self employed life satisfaction: the five-year gap.

A study that is actually about your decision.

For example, Reto Odermatt, Nattavudh Powdthavee and Alois Stutzer used German panel data. First, they found people who had just become self-employed and asked their expected life satisfaction. Then they returned five years later and measured it. In other words, the newly self-employed were overly optimistic, so their predictions came in higher than reality.

Why self employed life satisfaction fell short.

Specifically, the researchers found people put too much weight on the positive engagement of the work. Instead, they put too little on the workload. As a result, the data showed lower satisfaction with leisure and more hours worked than they wanted. In short, they were right that the work would absorb them, but wrong about the hours.

In fact, those hours came from evenings, weekends and the fortnight in August. Also, they came from time that used to belong to somebody else.

The honeymoon nobody warns you about.

Similarly, a British study by Georgellis and Yusuf tracked job satisfaction across the same transition. At first, it rises sharply the moment people go, and then it declines over the following years. This happens because expectations fail to arrive and the novelty wears down. In short, there is a honeymoon and then a settling, yet nobody sells the settling.