thoughts about expectations
If comparison is the thief of joy, then expectation is the Devil. Duplicitous and seductive, expectation is the whisper to our pride that we deserve what we’ve imagine.
We tell ourselves “This is how things should go” and mistake our projections for reasonable predictions.1 But expectation isn’t planning—its ego masquerading as logic.
Consider this simple scenario: Someone offers you a deal with no intention of deception. Say any word of your choice and receive $100 the next day. You respond with the word of your choice and the next day, this person returns with $50. Despite receiving cash for nothing, you will likely feel cheated. Expectation has poisoned what should have been pure gain by creating an artificial standard for satisfaction.
This is what expectation does. It transforms us from people appreciative of life’s gifts to debt-collectors checking whether the world has paid off what we think it owes us. Having already spent the pleasure in our minds, we feel relief—instead of joy—when good things happen and double the fury when they don’t.
During my internship search last semester, I made the difficult decision of giving up an easy and interesting position for one that I believed would offer real insight into my potential career. From day one, I expected meaningful work. Instead, I found myself running documents in the digital age and waiting for substantial assignments that never came. This wasn’t my vision of professional development, and it sent me into a spiral of resentment.
I had constructed an elaborate internal story about how things ought to unfold, then felt betrayed when reality disregarded my script. We crave outcomes indistinguishable to what we’ve imagined, but this attachment blinds us to opportunities that don’t fit our preconceptions; we’re unable to appreciate what’s happening because we’re mourning what we imagined.
The following week, when I finally accepted that the internship I’d dreamed of was null, I began finding shreds of meaning in the actual position before me. I took the free-time I was afforded to catch up on personal projects, find ways I could meaningfully contribute, and rise above my station. It remains imperfect and still pales beside what I had envisioned, but it is—at the very least—worthwhile. This experience transformed not because it changed, but because I stopped demanding it match my narrow vision.
Blame it on misleading job descriptions or inexperienced self-importance or youthful impatience, but I see this as a generalizable case. I thought myself deserving of a particular conclusion when the uncomfortable truth is that we do not bend reality, and He who does resents entitlement.
When we abandon the fiction that the universe owes us particular results, everything shifts. We’re threads in intricate tapestry we cannot begin to comprehend. Credit reality, it is far more creative than our expectations and far more generous than our petitions. What appears as a setback might very well be what the larger pattern requires. Remember, life is seldom linear, and good fortune—like existence itself—is a cherished gift. Enjoy the countless ways it may beautifully unfold.
Sometimes, our expectations may very well be reasonable. But that does not mean we are entitled to the reality we’ve produced. Apropos from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: “If you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”↩