expectations
“Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
A few years ago, while at the high school graduation party for a friend’s son, I was handed a card to fill out. Apparently these “advice for the graduate” cards are common, but it was new to me at the time. While others around me seemed to quickly jot down their words-of-wisdom, the task felt important enough for me to sit with for awhile.
After collecting my thoughts, the first thing I wrote was “Expect things to be hard.”
Whether we realize it or not, our minds are wired to craft expectations at an early age. Maybe it starts as cause and effect: we notice that when we cry, we get picked up or fed. We communicate in the only way we know, and get something in return. But at some point we cry and nothing happens. Nobody picks us up. Nobody feeds us. That’s when we experience a new set of emotions that bubble up when expectations don’t meet reality. Early in life, there’s usually more crying until we pass out from exhaustion.
We’re actually not that much different as adults. When an essay or paper we worked on for weeks gets a poor grade. When our new workout regime doesn’t lead to abs you can see from across the room. When we don’t get the job after multiple interviews and a presentation. Naturally, those same emotions do some bubbling. The thing is, when we place expectations on things out of our control, we’re setting ourselves up for suffering in the form of frustration. However, with some tweaking, we can reduce that suffering.
I stumbled across an illustrative formula awhile back, E>R=F. It is designed to illustrate that when expectations (E) exceed reality (R), frustration (F) ensues. F could also mean disappointment, resentment, etc. I’ve heard people say, “Expectations are just resentments waiting to happen.” And in my experience this is spot on. As much as we think we do, we have very little control over R. Because reality is going to do what reality does. Even if and when we do what can to influence it, it’s not fully in our control. We don't control the mood or perspective of the professor grading our paper. We don’t control our body type or genetics. And we have very little control during a typical corporate interview process. Our expectations (E) on the other hand, are not only in our control, but are fundamentally our responsibility.
Thanks to authors like Ryan Holiday, the ancient wisdom of the stoics has become approachable and feels wildly relevant in modern life. When I was first introduced to his book, The Obstacle is the Way, stoic principles felt new. One chapter after another pushed me to rethink how I was interacting with the world around me.
The foundation of the book is built on a quote from Meditations, the private journal of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Roman emperor writes, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Simply put, navigating life’s challenges is itself, life. To lay down when things get hard is not living. This speaks to the power of perception, and points directly to our expectations of what we feel our lives should be.
If we expect professors to see our genius, we’re more than likely to be crushed when they don’t. When we expect our endomorph, pear-shaped body to turn into an ectomorph by summer, we’re teed up for self-loathing. When we expect the job offer after a decent set of interviews, resentment for the process takes over when we don’t get an offer. But if we change the lens we view the world through, the emotional load lifts.
It’s important to clarify, this isn’t about settling for less or having lower standards. More so, it’s about changing the story we tell ourselves about how things should be. I love hiking, but expecting a smooth path doesn’t change the terrain. Hard work often goes unnoticed, and doesn’t necessarily get the results we’re looking for. The goal and the difficulty aren't in conflict, they’re both just part of the journey. A fulfilling life is most often a life full of challenges.
Aurelius goes on to state we should approach life like a wrestler, not a dancer. When dancing, we expect our partner to move with us. Once established, there is a predictability to the tempo and melody of a song. And if our partner or the music shifts unexpectedly, we’re caught off guard and the whole thing can easily fall apart. As beautiful as life can be, I can’t say it ever felt like a dance.
“Not a dancer but a wrestler: waiting, poised and dug in, for sudden assaults.”
Therefor, if we shift our perspective to expect obstacles and commit to engaging with whatever happens, we’re immeasurably more prepared for the obstacles life is going to throw at us. Long before modern therapy modalities, the stoics outlined a form of psychological flexibility with the Latin phrase “amore fati”, which translates to “love of fate”. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), psychological flexibility is the ability to be present with reality as it is, not as we imagined it would be.
Changing our expectations seems simple enough, but like so many things we’ll cover in this book, our own nature is working against us.
In 1971, psychologist Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell introduced the idea of the Hedonic Treadmill. They theorized that humans have a natural tendency to normalize positive circumstances, resetting our expectations upward, making the next difficulty feel more jarring. That is, when something goes smoothly or our life improves, our expectations reset in such a way that our next hardship feels worse than it might have previously. In 1978, Brickman adapted the theory more broadly to state our perception of a challenge is dependent on the comparison we give it to previous challenges.
When we throw this into modern life, a glaring issue arises. Over the last 20+ years, we’ve over-indexed for frictionless experiences. Most of us have come to expect convenience and comfort at all times. We’re conditioned to believe life indoors should be between 68-74°F with 30% relative humidity. We expect our upcoming vacation to be better than the last one. Our new car? You guessed it, it’s gotta be an upgrade.
In Michael Easter’s 2021 book, The Comfort Crisis, he refers to this hedonic tendency as “comfort creep”. The slow, nearly invisible process where yesterday's luxury becomes today's standard. Not surprisingly, comfort creep has a friend: problem creep. 2018 Harvard research found that as people experience fewer real problems, they don't become more satisfied. They just lower the threshold for what counts as a problem.
Together, they form a trap. Comfort creep raises expectations on outcomes, while problem creep lowers the standard for challenges. So, we end up more distressed and frustrated than ever while living objectively better lives. It’s absolutely wild, but completely unsurprising when you stop and look at modern life for more than five minutes.
To quote poet Robert Frost, “The best way out is always through.”
We have to acknowledge and push through those natural tendencies. We have to honest about the stories we tell ourselves. Instead of expecting the chart to always trend up and to the right, we need to fall in love with the reality that things will rise and fall. Life is a series of puzzles, obstacles, and unexpected plot twists. Like a wrestler preparing for a match, we have to expect things to be hard. And when they are, we accept the challenges in front us. We look at them objectively, and find a way through knowing another hurdle or setback is probably around the next blind curve. Expecting anything other than that is unrealistic, and a recipe for frustration, disappointment, and resentment.