In life, expectations are a dicey thing. They are the root cause of half the problems in the world, and yet continue to be an integral part of human personality because our creator had a twisted sense of humour. The premise of expectation is a lingering sense of optimism, curiosity and disappointment. In theory, if you do not expect anything from anyone, you will never be disappointed. For example, write an exam, and without any thought how the exam went, just forget about it. Or if you’re hell bent upon doing a SWOT analysis, assume that you’re failing. If you flunk, life goes on. If you pass, you’re over the moon because you didn’t expect such a good result.
The same principle, in theory, can be applied to any aspect of life. Take friendship for example.
Everyone has expectations of their friends, and the better friends you are, the more you expect. It may be about understanding you, empathizing, or anything else, which is what friendship is about anyway. But if you didn’t have these expectations, these benchmarks, of your friends, that would eliminate all chances of a quarrel, or distancing yourself, because in such a situation, you literally accept people for what they are and nothing more, and vice versa, I would presume. Thus, there would be no friction, and a steady definition of what things are and what things aren’t.>
Practically, all of this may be absolute rubbish. How can you live without expectations? How can you live without any belief about the future whatsoever? Doesn’t that absolve life of all purpose? One could even argue that expectations are the fabric of meaningful existence. But since they create so many problems and solve none, that makes the scenario all the more tricky.
To find a balance between not expecting anything at all and having some expectation from everything and everyone, the best idea is to narrow down the list of those people who will always live up to expectations of those things that will never disappoint.
This would keep a person within the realm of expectations, while at the same time, expecting nothing out of anyone or anything else, thus freeing us up mentally of emotionally. Expectations should be a privilege, not par for the course. Hence, the crux is to have expectations only when you are absolutely certain that they will be lived up to. However, having that amount of certainty beforehand is virtually impossible, because it is all relative. People, things, expectations, are all relative to time, place, context, methods and completely subject to change in one or more factors.
In such a case, estimation and reasoning seem to be the only ways to reach a suitable conclusion. Your individual assessment of people and things, the trust you choose to place in them and ironically, your expectation, will lead you to create a ‘list’ of ‘fool-proof expectations’.
Why do all this in the first place? We are living, and decently enough, aren’t we? So why bring such a change? For me, personally, disappointment is extremely hard to get over. Disappointment of any kind. For me, Batman versus Superman not being good enough, a friend cancelling a meeting, failing an exam and not being able to like up to parents’ expectations all constitute a high level of misery, among a million others.
This is the only solution I could devise and I figure that it is impossible for me to be the only one with this problem. On a closing note, I should read that novel by Dickens better than I did last time. I think it’s called Great Expectations.
