Fulfilling a long-cherished desire of visiting a place may make you feel good, but sharing those epic moments of your life with friends may leave you with feeling of social isolation, says a study.
To be extraordinary is to be different than other people, and social interaction is grounded in similarities, the study noted.
"Extraordinary experiences are pleasurable in the moment but can leave us socially worse off in the long run," says psychological scientist and study author Gus Cooney of the Harvard University.
"The participants in our study mistakenly thought that having an extraordinary experience would make them the star of the conversation," Cooney aded.
"We all appreciate experiences that are fine and rare, and when we get what we want, we're always eager to tell our friends. But I have noticed that conversations always seem to thrive on more ordinary topics," Cooney explained.
The study involved 68 participants.
These findings suggest that we might want to be more judicious in determining how we share our experiences with others, but also that we might want to give more thought in choosing which experiences to partake in.
"If an experience turns you into someone who has nothing in common with others, then no matter how good it was, it would not make you happy in the long run," Cooney pointed out.
The study appeared in the journal Psychological Science.
