The Ramblings of a Curmudgeon or a Time to Lower Expectations

Many of us live in cultures that have taught us that we should expect the world. As children, we are told that we can be or do whatever it is that we want. We were shown inspirational posters and we were put in front of inspirational speakers that told us to ''follow our dreams" and "shoot for the moon." These messages sunk in too. Many of us think we deserve lots of things and maybe we do but the world does operate in the way we have been told. Good, deserving people end up slaving away and having very little to show for it. Countless funny and interesting individuals remain in obscurity despite their gifts. Nearly all of us wish to fulfill a dream but many will not succeed in the end and most of us will slip along the way. This is, of course, normal. Despite our feelings, there should be no shame in failure. Many things are out of our control and not a single one of us is capable of everything. A problem arises, however, when we are blinded to reality by expectations and entitlement. Those unrealistic feelings and flawed beliefs cause us to see problems where there are none. We begin to look at our natural shortcomings and normal failures as being indicative of some nonexistent defect. The sting we feel when something is shown to be out of our reach is greatly increased by unrealistic expectations. Sometimes, people drive themselves mad or even physically hurt themselves or others while following a dream which they feel they are entitled to having fulfilled. In short, the platitudes that make us feel good and our tendency to believe that they are true cause us harm. Fortunately, if we are willing to cast off our expectations we can increase our contentment and avoid the disappointment, pain, and lasting harm which these feelings often bring.

Before I go on, I want to clarify that it is fine to purse the things that we want. It is great to have hopes and dreams. Working to achieve a goal or to better one's life is admirable. Thinking that we deserve good things is not inherently negative. Those feelings and desires only become problematic when one begins to believe that he or she is entitled to them by his or her nature and expects to obtain them with ease. One can, absolutely, work for something that he or she dreams about without feeling as though it is his or hers by right. One can attempt to achieve something without expecting assured success. I just wanted to make it clear that I am not some curmudgeon who is here to tell you that your dreams are "stupid" or that you should give up on them.

Now, let me tell you about how many of our dreams are stupid and why we should give up on them. I jest, but we do have a habit of maintaining unrealistic expectations and nursing our sense of entitlement. It isn't all our fault. Some of this phenomenon was probably bred into us by our ancient ancestors. Some cave person was more likely to go out and look for food if he or she had overly inflated expectations about finding it. That happened enough, those cave people survived, and now many of us walk around with undeserved egos, thanks to our progenitors. The other source of our unrealistic expectations and undeserved sense entitlement is our culture and the myths that it perpetuate. It would be easy to blame these things on the self-esteem movement (and I do to some degree) but these parts of our collective consciousness go far deeper and are much older. Before all the self-esteem propagandists started handing out trophies for not winning, our little heads were still being filled with stories about the humble something or someone who could achieve great things if he or she or it believes hard enough. The Little Engine that Could says "I think I can" and makes up the hill. The pious shepherd slays the giant and becomes a king. The slimy frog seduces a princess and she transforms him into a prince by making-out with him (I may be misremembering that story). The point is, these concepts are deeply programmed into our minds as children and they continue to be pushed on us throughout school and into adult hood. We, over time, begin to see ourselves as that train or frog and we start to think that our rewards are assured and deserved as a matter of our very nature. However, reality doesn't play out the way the stories do. Sometimes, the hill really is too steep and thinking "I can" won't change that. The big guy often beats up the little guy no matter how pious he is. Chances are, a princess isn't going to want to put her mouth on our frogs and even if she did, it won't make princes of us. It might make the frog feel good, though. This paragraph is going off the rails but I think I can get back on track. Jokes aside, the combination of the unrealistic expectations that were placed on us and our natural overestimation of our abilities causes us to strive for things that are often far out of our reach and this leads to disappointment and the potential for harm or exploitation.

One may wonder, how much damage can the combination of entitlement and unrealistic expectations really cause? The answer is more than he or she would think. For example, I will point to the recent "YouTube shooter." She was angry because she did not receive the attention which she felt that she deserved and expected to receive. The disappointment and her inability to reconcile her expectations with reality pushed her over the edge and she tried to kill people as a result. Fortunately, she was incompetent with her weapon and the victims survived. We also could look the people who fall off buildings and die because they overestimated their parkour skills and expected to make some jump that was far beyond their abilities. I am aware that those are extreme scenarios but the harm can come in other forms too. If one spends his or her life seeking something that he or she can never find, he or she will miss out on many of the good things that were within reach the entire time. Being repeatedly denied the things that we think we deserve takes a toll on us by making us feel inadequate, abnormal, or without value. The dark irony is that the lies that were designed to improve our self-esteem and the instincts that once helped us to survive now harm our feeling of worth and make our continued existence less bearable.

There is a shockingly simple solution. The problem is with our thought and this means that it only requires a change in the way we think to solve it. This is easier said than done. Simplicity does not indicate effortlessness, sadly, and there are many ways to go about doing accomplishing this goal but every method may not work for every person. The intention is to rid ourselves of many of our expectations (some of them are good, though, like expecting to be killed if you step out in front of a train, for example) and suppress our sense of entitlement. How one choose to accomplish this is his or her decision. I, personally, think this is an instance in which psychedelics can be very helpful. They certainly will teach one that expectations are of little value and ego death will dissolve ideas about deserved success right along with the sense of self. Others may find that meditating with the goal of reducing expectation can be effective (I am no expert in that subject, though). However, such grand things are not required. One could just try to make a conscious effort to not overly anticipate positive outcomes and this would probably be just as efficacious as anything else. It doesn't matter which path we take, so long as we reach our destination.

Learning to lower our expectations and suppress our entitlement has some pretty rewarding outcomes. When we no longer expect to get the things that we want and we stop feeling as though they are ours by right, we protect ourselves from disappointment because we are not crushed when our dreams do not come true. We are more difficult to exploit because we do not believe the people who tell us that they can give us everything we ever wanted (for a price, of course). Making this change in our thought allows us to see when the time is right to quit and we won't squander our short lives seeking some unattainable sense of self-satisfaction in our more unlikely desires. We will not lose our minds or damage our bodies (as I did in my youthful pursuit of athletics) by chasing implausible accomplishments. Finally and most importantly, by pushing expectation and entitlement aside, we allow ourselves to see and appreciate the value of the people and things around us. We will no longer be blind to the good in our lives because it moves from the background of our understanding into the forefront of our consciousness and that is a goal worth working toward, in my opinion.

Of course, all of this could just be what I tell myself to justify my own failures. Some people will certainly think that this is the case and that is fine because I don't expect anyone to listen to me. Seriously though, I can't claim to have all the answers and the view point that I present is no more valid than anyone else's but it is hard to deny the potential harm that entitlement and unrealistic expectations can have on a person. There are, doubtlessly, other ways one can to go about changing those aspects of the self but I find that expecting less is effective and beneficial to one's happiness.

Peace.

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.