A Word About Expectations

Does the world need expectations?

Think about it. If you are like me, I'm sure you see examples of people failing to meet expectations all around you. Maybe you see someone on public transit who is unecessarily rude to another passenger. Maybe you see a co-worker dropping the ball yet again. Maybe your parents are too involved or uninvolved in your life. Maybe your new or existing love interest failed to do something, or didn't do something quite right. Or, maybe you yourself failed to live up to a tenent of your life.

The point is that every day is filled with potential opportunities to observe, first hand, how expectations don't get met.

The natural counter to the above is that each day also presents abundant opportunities to see expectations being met. But, the question becomes, are the two types of opportunity equivalent. To that question, I would say absolutely not!

When an expectation is not met there is a notable sense of dissapointment - it may be small, but it might also be huge. The dissapointment may be most pronounced when it applies to ourself, when we fail to do as we think we should.

On the flipside, when an expectation is met, there is little joy, pleasure, or positive reflection. After all, the behaviour was expected, or put another way, it was the baseline of what we were willing to accept.

So, in essence, we have structured a scenario that at best keeps us in a neutral state (when people meet our expectations), but is heavily sided toward being negative (when expectations are not met).

So what to do? Do we simply remove expectations of ourselves and others from the equation of life? No, I don't think so. The result would be pure anarchy. To varying degrees, we all modify our behaviour according to what others deem acceptable and in this way, maybe our eccentricities are curtailed. Whether this is good or bad is open to debate, but I would suggest that within reason it is a good thing. In a way, expectations are a means of ascribing accountability to one another. Were we without them, we would have no accountability to others, and the world would truly be dog eat dog.

So if living with expectations is a huge challenge, and divorcing ourselves of them is not in the cards, what are we to do?

I think the solution is two fold. Firstly, do not act so quickly to scorn if an expectation is not met. By and large people aren't out to dissapoint intentionally. You might find some people that are, but I would suggest that they are an aberration, and not representative of the norm. Appreciate that there are likely reasons for the failure and that the person may in fact be struggling with meeting differing sets of expectations, perhaps those of yours and their own.

The other key element in all of this of course is to articulate what your expectations are of others. After all, how can others be expected to know what u expect, especially if your expectations are appreciably different from their own and/or of the people they most often associate with. Of course this is much more easily done with people you interact with often and is more difficult with the stranger on the street.

So, at the end of the day, I think the key is not to get too hung up on expectations, and to share the ones that truly are of consequence to you. But try to make your list of expectations a small one indeed, for the best of all concerned.

That is my two cents for the day.