Our culture is built on expectations. We expect our partner, our co-worker, our boss, our parents, our children, our favorite politician, our neighbor, and everyone else in our little picture of life to behave in a certain way.
We expect life itself to go a certain way.
The problem is that nothing always goes as we imagine it. And this is not because life is unfair, but because it is deeply uncertain.
Expecting something to follow our plans or for someone to behave as we imagine it in our minds means believing that we are masters of the infinite range of possibilities of which life is the guardian.
Expectation is a mental prison that it is important to get rid of if we want to live more peacefully.
It makes us emotionally fragile, limits us in considering alternatives to achieve our fulfilment, exacerbates relationships with others by making us forget that each person is an evolving world, waiting to be discovered, and that we cannot harness them in a role that responds to our needs.
The problem with expectations arises precisely when we expect things in life to go the way we want. And everything that happens differently isn’t good, it’s wrong, and it makes us feel bad.
What do unfulfilled expectations lead to? To illusions and disappointments simply because reality cannot be modeled on our expectations, just as our expectations may not be what others want.
When people focus on their goals and ideals, they may achieve more. They may pursue things with a passion they rarely have when pushed.
Often the initial expectation is not reflected in reality precisely because it is not based on real data and turns into disappointment. The intensity of disappointment depends on two factors: the importance of what is expected and the time spent waiting. In an effort not to disappoint, one is disappointed.
Letting go of expectations can be difficult, but it’s also very liberating. For example, we begin to understand that we don’t need to meet other people’s expectations because we are in touch with our own desires and passions. And that can even empower us to build better, more balanced relationships.
I also think that when we don’t expect anything – from a person, from an event, from life – everything that happens is a gift. Yes, because we remain open and curious about what can come.
Let us, therefore, abandon the claim to control events and people, and learn that, in order to be able to control reality, it is necessary to accept its constant changeability, recognize and welcome events, learning to attribute the right importance to them.
Making an objective examination of situations that really takes into account all the positive and negative variables involved, at least helps us to nurture healthy expectations towards contexts and towards people.
If we want to expect something, let us expect it from ourselves. The only expectations that we can somehow “control” are those towards ourselves and it is essential that we focus our efforts on these. We abandon the claim to be able to change the other or to be able to change situations and focus on ourselves and our needs.
Rather than constantly having expectations, it is better to have aspirations. Aspirations are a call to look up, beyond, and outside the box (“strong desire to achieve a noble, or at least legitimate, goal on the part of individuals, nations, social groups”). Expectations, on the other hand, are those that lie there, lurking, determined to squeeze us into a horizon drawn by others to which we can respond.
After all, placing high expectations on an event or worse on a person means nothing more than making a (not obvious) prediction about the “probability of it happening”. The more we attach ourselves to that probability, the more we risk suffering.
The worst solution to disappointment, however, is precisely not to create more expectations to avoid being disappointed. A decidedly more effective strategy requires stimulating self-reflection.
Waiting for something shouldn’t be eliminated completely, but it is correct to reserve commitment and effort for just and achievable goals.
In our VUCA world with all its volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity expectations are even very hard to be realized,
This is because small events may change the trajectory of what we expect to directions we never expected.
So, you are spot on to write, Aldo
“Expectation is a mental prison that it is important to get rid of if we want to live more peacefully.”
The above facts dictate on us to go in small steps and then probe and sense what happens before we act. Illusions only lead to disappointments