Change is inevitable. Nobody argues with that, which is part of why the sentence is so easy to say to someone in the middle of one.
The phrase rarely travels alone, though. It usually arrives attached to a second claim, the one that makes it consoling rather than merely true: that whatever the change is, you will adapt to it, and in a while you will be roughly yourself again. That second claim has a formal version in psychology, and it has not held up as well as the first.
The comfortable theory
Set-point theory holds that each person has a characteristic level of wellbeing, that events knock them off it, and that they drift back. It is the reason “you’ll get over it” can be said in a tone of scientific reassurance rather than mere hope.
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It was never a silly idea. People clearly do absorb enormous events and carry on. The question is whether they land back where they started, and that turns out to be answerable, because Germany has been asking a very large number of people the same question every year for decades.
What the long panel found
Richard Lucas, Andrew Clark, Yannis Georgellis and Ed Diener used a 15-year German panel of more than 24,000 people to look at what happens around specific events.
On unemployment, writing in Psychological Science, they reported that participants did not completely return to their former levels of satisfaction even after they became reemployed. The job came back. The number did not, not entirely.
There is a second result in that paper which is stranger and rarely quoted. If adaptation worked the way the theory describes, having been through unemployment once should soften the blow of a second spell. It did not. People who had been unemployed before reacted no less strongly the next time.
Why the averages conceal this
The same team turned to marital transitions in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and this is where the shape of the problem becomes clear.
On average, they found, people reacted to events and then adapted back toward baseline. Read the average alone and set-point theory looks fine. But the individual trajectories underneath it did not behave. Those who reacted most strongly at first were still far from baseline years later, and many people moved in the direction opposite to what adaptation theory predicts.
Their conclusion is the sentence worth keeping: marital transitions can be associated with long-lasting changes in satisfaction, and those changes get overlooked when only average trends are examined.
That is a general hazard rather than a fact about marriage. An average that returns to baseline can be made of one group that bounced back further than they started and another that never came back at all.
An independent check, twenty years long
Those two papers share a team and a dataset, so they are one line of evidence rather than two. A separate group, working with a different cohort and different instruments, found the same shape.
The Saxon Longitudinal Study has surveyed an age-homogeneous East German sample annually since 1987, through the disruption that followed reunification. Reporting in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, the researchers followed 355 of them on questions about unemployment from 1996, when the participants were 23 and half the sample had already been affected by it.
At all 16 measurement points, people who had never been unemployed reported higher life satisfaction than those who had been unemployed once, and the repeatedly unemployed reported the lowest of all. By 2016, only 2 percent of the cohort were currently unemployed. The differences between those who had experienced it and those who had not were still there.
What this does not show
These are observational panels, not experiments. Nobody assigned anyone to lose a job. Unemployment arrives bundled with everything that caused it and everything that followed, and none of these studies can separate the event from its company.
The Saxon authors describe their effects as small to medium, which is worth repeating in their words rather than sharpening. And two of the three findings concern unemployment specifically. This is not a general law about change, it is a result about particular events that have been followed long enough to check.
They are also group patterns. A distribution cannot tell any individual what a particular loss will do to them, and the striking thing in the marital paper is precisely how differently people inside the same average behaved.
What survives, and why it might help
The first half of the phrase is intact. The second half is doing more work than it has earned.
Some changes appear to shift the level rather than dent it, and the belief that everyone returns to their old baseline may be one of the quieter unkindnesses in circulation. It puts a clock on other people’s recovery. Someone who is not back to themselves three years after something is not failing at adaptation, and on this evidence they are not unusual either.
The more accurate consolation is a smaller one. People do carry on, and the carrying on is real. It just does not always take the form of going back.