The Curse of Expectations
Expectation is the thief of joy. Everything that we pursue in life is done so because we expect a particular outcome. Everything we don’t do in life is because we expect a particular outcome. We are the expectations that we project into the future.
I’ll use my own experience as a yardstick. When I graduated college, I set lofty goals for my career. Over the years, I’ve moved jobs frequently, trying to climb the ladder to fulfill my own sense of worth. Today, I make far more than I expected to. When I graduated, I had a very limited view of the real world. If you had told me at 22 where I would be at 30, I would expect that I’d be quite pleased with myself. And yet, with each new job, with each new modification to my career, the expectations change. The standard which I measure my life with changes as the variables in my environment change. Each new job I take provides me with new co-workers to measure myself against. Each increase in salary leads me to compare myself to the next level in my career.
Improving your life by X amount typically leads to a 2X increase in your expectations. It is human nature. We constantly pay attention to individuals who have more, do more, or make more. As our situation in life changes and we pass certain people in one or more areas, we find new people to measure ourselves against. Until we learn to separate our actions from our expectations of what the outcome will be, we will be in a continuous cycle of disappointment.
Expectations do play a crucial role in our lives. If I run this red light, I can expect to either get a ticket, or worse, injure myself or others. When I’m looking for a show to watch on Netflix, I typically take advice from friends and family because I like them and if they liked this movie, I expect that I’ll like it to. All of the decisions that we make each day are made with an unconscious prediction of what the future will look like. If we didn’t have this automated mechanism to help us make decisions, life would be difficult.
This automated process in our brain functions by deep programming from years of experience and memories that have accumulated in our brain. We remember that time our parents made us eat squash and therefore, we expect for squash to taste like shit. How often do we ever question these programmed responses? Do we ever have a prediction about the future and think, “Is this an accurate representation or am I predisposed to believe this because of that time when I was 5 and so and so happened?”. If you are lucky, you may question your inner decision making once every few days. Few people can deliberately walk-through their decision making and adjust their choices based off of the knowledge of their own biases.
What can we do to counteract this problem? We know that we are making decisions, not because they are the right decisions, but because our brains are predisposed to think in certain ways. The expectations that drive who we are, need to be checked, so that we can actually be in control of our lives and not running unconstrained on auto-pilot.
The only solution that I have found to be helpful in my life is by meditation, particularly, Natural Awareness meditation. I’ve recently been using an app called FitMind. FitMind was created by Liam McClintock, a Yale graduate who, after a few years working in Finance, moved to Asia to study meditation full time. After studying meditation, he returned to King’s college in London to study neuroscience and bridge the gap between the benefits of meditation and the neurological happenings of the brain and how the two variables relate.
Liam goes over many different types of meditation, but I found Natural Awareness to be the most Immediately actionable in my life. Natural Awareness is the understanding that the thoughts that you have within your brain don’t come from “You”. If you look inside yourself and try to identify where your thoughts are coming from, you can’t pinpoint an exact location. That voice in your head that complains about how bored you are in line at the grocery store doesn’t live in any one location within your body. This realization allows you to see that there is a deeper level of human nature, that lives within you that allows you to just exist. This existence is above the voice in your head. It allows you to see the world from an elevated plane, where you don’t allow the mysterious black box of your decision making to run your life.
The problem is, to reside in this place of natural awareness, it takes a lot of work and concentration. You’ve already spent your entire life thinking and living one way. Trying to completely change your thought process and how you exist in a short time is near impossible. The goal is to practice each morning. Remind yourself that this way of existence is beneficial to you. Then, try your best to dwell in this place as much as possible.
This won’t solve all of the issues that expectations cause in your life, but it will give you clarity to second guess what you expect. It allows you to look past what you think you know, and try and see the world objectively, as it is.
