Expectations

Expectations are the quickest way I know to ruin a good day.

You decide how something is going to go. It goes some other way. And now you feel like cr*p, not because of what happened, but because of what you had already decided would happen.

We like predictability. Doesn’t mean it’s doing us any favours.

There are two kinds of expectation worth separating.

• The ones you can do something about. Turning up on time. Doing the work. Saying what you want.

• The ones you can’t. How she replies. Whether your mates care as much as you do. What the weather does on the day.

The first kind is a plan. The second kind is a bet you didn’t know you’d placed, and you only find out when you lose it.

I used to be terrible at this.

Waiting for a text from a girl I liked. Assuming people cared about a thing as much as I did. Deciding how a night was going to go before I’d left the house. When it didn’t go that way it was a constant head f*ck.

The odd part is that most of the time things did go my way.

But when they didn’t? Holy sh*t, I’d lose it.

Not out loud, usually. Inside. A full day of sulking over a reply that came four hours later than I’d decided it should. She didn’t know there was a deadline. I hadn’t told her. I’d just set one in my head and then punished us both for it.

It’s embarrassing to write down. It was also the thing that eventually taught me the lesson: tie yourself to an outcome you don’t control and you’ve handed your mood to someone who doesn’t know they’re holding it. I covered the worst version of this in Neediness.

The disappointment was never the event. It was the distance between the event and the picture you’d drawn of it.

Look at the right-hand bar. It’s not nothing. Most of the time what you got was fine. A decent date, a decent night out, a decent reply.

It only reads as a failure because you measured it against the left-hand bar, and you built the left-hand bar yourself, in your head, for free, with no evidence.

Lower the left bar and the same evening becomes a good one. Nothing about the evening changed.

There’s a line that gets pinned on Shakespeare. Nobody has ever found it in one of his plays, but whoever said it was right.

There’s a reason the gap hurts more than it should.

In 1997 Wolfram Schultz and colleagues published a study in Science on dopamine neurons in monkeys. The monkeys learned that a light meant juice was coming. Once they knew, the neurons stopped firing for the juice and fired for the light instead. The reward had moved to the expectation.

The interesting part is what happened when the juice didn’t turn up. At the exact moment it should have arrived, the neurons dipped below their normal rate. Not back to zero. Below it.

So the picture in your head isn’t harmless. Your brain has already spent the reward on the picture. When reality comes in under it, you’re not just missing a win. You’re paying back a loan.

The usual advice here is Eckhart Tolle’s: stay in the present, don’t tie your happiness to the result. I rolled my eyes at that for years. Then I read the monkey study and realised he was describing the same mechanism, just without the juice.

Most of the expectations that get you are invisible. Not to you. To everyone else.

You expected a mate to ask how the interview went. He didn’t, so he doesn’t care. You expected her to make a fuss of your birthday. She did a card. You expected your dad to say well done. He said the car needs a wash.

None of these people were told the rules. They failed a test they didn’t know they were sitting.

Don Miguel Ruiz has a decent line on it in The Four Agreements: don’t make assumptions. Blunt, but that’s all this is. You assumed, they didn’t deliver, and you’ve called it a let-down when it was a guess.

So what’s the fix?

Say it out loud. If it matters that she rings, tell her it matters. If you want your mate to ask about the interview, text him and say it went well. It feels less romantic than being read like a book. It also works, and the mind-reading never did.

The expectations you can’t say out loud without sounding unreasonable are the ones to drop. If you’d be embarrassed to ask for it, you’ve no business being gutted when it doesn’t arrive.

Expecting things from a situation you have zero say in is the fast lane to frustration.

Mark Manson’s version is that you’ve only got so many f*cks to give, so spend them on things you can actually move. Yours. Your effort, your reaction, what you say, when you leave.

Everything else is weather. You can dress for it. You can’t book it.

Same with timing. Not everything happens on your schedule, and pushing harder on something that isn’t ready mostly just breaks it. Leave it a week. The thing you were forcing often turns up on its own, and if it doesn’t, that was your answer.

I haven’t dropped expectations altogether. You can’t, and you shouldn’t. I expect myself to turn up, do the work and be straight with people. That’s the left-hand list from the top, and it’s mine to keep.

The other list I’ve mostly let go.

I don’t decide how a night is going to go before I leave the house. I don’t set a deadline on a reply. I tell people what I want from them instead of waiting to be disappointed. And when something goes better than I thought, I notice it, which is the whole point of Gratitude: keeping your eye on the bar you’ve got, not the one you drew.

Most things still go my way. The difference is that when they don’t, I don’t lose it. There was no bar to fall short of.

Expect less of the world. Expect more of yourself. That’s about it.