Simracing Psychology
There's a trap almost every beginner falls into and almost nobody warns you about. It's not about the gear, the settings, or copying the wrong drivers. It's the quiet promise you make to yourself. You'll enjoy this once you're fast. By the time you realise it isn't true, you've already lost years to it.
Start here
Quick honesty before I get into this. I'm not a pro and I don't want to be. I'm a dude who's been simracing for a long time and studied a bit of psychotherapy along the way. The more time I spend in the rig, the more I see the links between what's happening in our heads as drivers and what I learned on the course. Most sim racers never notice them. This is my attempt to put some of them on the page.
Every beginner I've met does some version of this. I did it myself for years. The voice in your head goes something like this.
The voice in your head
You're not Thanos. Relax.
The trap is that fast is a moving goalpost. There's no finish line. The 1K driver thinks they'll enjoy it at 2K. The 2K driver at 3K. The 3K driver is still grinding for 4K. And the aliens at the very top, the genuinely world-class drivers, are still chasing as well. Nobody ever feels fast enough. Everyone has postponed their own satisfaction to a moment in the future that, mathematically, cannot arrive.
Naming it
Coined by a psychologist called Tal Ben-Shahar. The research on it is fairly consistent and probably sounds familiar if you're also a human.
Humans consistently overestimate how good an achievement will make us feel, and consistently underestimate how quickly the goalpost moves once we get there. You hit the goal. You feel good for a moment. And then your brain immediately resets. The thing you wanted is now the baseline. A new goal slides into view.
Sim racing is a near-perfect environment for arrival fallacy. And honestly, that's a big part of what makes the hobby so addictive. Think about how visible everything is.
Why sim racing makes it worse
Visible numbers
iRating sits on your screen. License class is right there. Your finishing position is public.
Obvious hierarchy
You can see exactly who's above you. The mistakes you made, the ones you didn't. All on display.
Real but constant improvement
You never properly plateau. There's always a version of you who's a bit faster.
You can always see a version of yourself who's a bit faster, a bit more consistent, a bit more respected. So you postpone your enjoyment of the hobby into a moment that, by the design of the system, cannot arrive.
A personal one
I want to be honest, because I lived in and out of this trap for a while myself.
I genuinely believed that once I hit 3K iRating, I'd feel like I'd made it. That I'd settle into the hobby. That I could finally stop chasing. That the satisfaction was waiting for me at a specific number.
Then one day, almost by accident, in a 3K iRating race, I hit it. The close, bumper-to-bumper, three-wide-into-turn-one racing I used to watch on YouTube and wonder if I'd ever get to. And there I was, in the middle of one. At the end I was pumped, wired, buzzing.
Then about ten minutes later, my brain quietly said, “Yeah, 4K would be nice.”
That was the moment. The number I'd been chasing had arrived, and it didn't change a single thing about how I felt long-term. The race itself was amazing, and the ones after it too. But the milestone I thought would unlock satisfaction did nothing. I'd been chasing the wrong thing the entire time.
The fix
The drivers who enjoy this hobby the most aren't the fastest. They're the ones who fell in love with the process, not the result. I've watched it with my own eyes more times than I can count.
Chasing the number
Chasing the driver
Take a driver who finishes P14, but they're grinning because they hit their marks, kept it clean, and genuinely impressed themselves. They'll have a better time than the 4K driver white-knuckling their way towards 10K with a jaw locked shut. The fastest people you race against are still chasing something. The trap doesn't end at any tier. There is no level at which you arrive.
I'm not telling you to throw out your goals. Having an iRating goal can be healthy. It gives the hobby a shape, a reason to practice. iRating is based on your results. Good results, it goes up. Bad results, it goes down. You find a home somewhere along the way.
Here's what changed everything for me. I stopped trying to enjoy hitting the goal, and started trying to enjoy becoming the driver who naturally sits at that level.
There's no real number fixed to it anymore. My own goal is that I want to race people I consider to be fast. That's a completely different game. Because hitting a number is a moment. Being the driver who belongs at a number is a person. And the person is the part that lasts. Once I started chasing the driver, not the number, the goal stopped dangling in front of me like a carrot. It started pulling me forward like a direction.
Where the joy lives
The fix isn't to lower your expectations. It's to stop postponing enjoyment into the future and start finding it in the current rep. The corner you nailed today. The race you finished without losing your head. The sound the tyres made when they loaded up under brake.
Or the Discord conversation after a race when something went brilliantly or terribly, or you ended up chatting to someone you've never met. Recently a stranger DM'd me out of nowhere with a link to Crew Chief, presumably because I'd made some catastrophic mistake they'd noticed. That's part of it too.
The hobby is genuinely good. Right now. At whatever level you're at. You just have to look up and notice it.
Wins that are already there
Beyond the rig
Pick any domain where you can measure progress and the arrival fallacy is sitting there waiting for you. Same mechanism, same trap, different costume.
Sim Racing
“Once I hit 3K iRating, I'll relax and enjoy it.”
Fitness
“Once I lose the weight, then I'll be happy in my body.”
Career
“Once I get the promotion, then I can stop grinding.”
Money
“Once I hit X in the bank, finally I'll relax.”
Status
“Once people see me as the real deal, I'll feel like it.”
I'll be a little vulnerable on this one. I've been trying to lose a bit of weight lately. A few failed attempts in the past, partly because I didn't want it more than I wanted things in the moment. This time it's been easier. Instead of chasing some arbitrary kilogram goal, I'm trying to meet and fall in love with the version of myself who already lives that way. What does that person eat? What does their day look like? How do they treat their body? That process gives me wins every day, instead of one wobbly moment a fortnight on a set of scales.
Same mechanism, different track. Sim racing is just an unusually compressed version of the same human pattern. You get to watch it happen to yourself in real time, with a stopwatch. Which means if you can spot the trap in here, in the rig, you can start spotting it everywhere else in your life, if you let it.
The real value
The hobby isn't just a game.
It's a mirror.
It shows you how you treat your own progress. How you handle things going wrong. What you postpone, what you chase, what you actually want. Spot the pattern in the rig, and you can start spotting it everywhere else. If you want to.
A note on Simracing Psychology
The arrival fallacy is one pattern. There are plenty more. Choking under pressure. Ego that costs you a race you had won. Frustration compounding until you're fighting the wheel rather than driving it. Why your leg shakes in the big moments. All documented, all understood, all very trainable, if you know what you're looking at.
My Simracing Psychology series is the home for all of this. Videos, writing, the long version of every one of these threads.
It's a flight simulator for being a person.
Sim racing reveals who you are. And then it gives you ten thousand laps to become someone better.
Keep going
Everything below is something I've made, used, or written. Affiliate links are marked the same way they are everywhere else on the site.
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