Life Sucks When Your Expectations Are Not Met
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The difference between expectation and reality is often the source of significant discontent.
Life trains us to search for ideals: the perfect partner, job, life, outcome. Unfortunately this almost never arises and even if it did, it would be fleeting.
Thus there is a real potential for ongoing and almost contentious self inflicted suffering. Thankfully, happiness is closer than you think. By embracing mindfulness we can begin to see and address the impact of our expectations.
In this episode, I share with you a talk that I have released on Insight Timer - the #1 meditation app for sleep, anxiety, & stress.
Click play below to listen or scroll down to read the transcript:
Expectations vs. Reality
How much of your discontent is a function of a misalignment between your expectations vs. reality?
I have this feeling that a lot of us judge our life based on what it should be, what we think it should be. We compare this ideal, this ‘should’, with our reality, and our reality always comes up short.
Because how can reality live up to an ideal? And furthermore, I posit that this ideal is instilled upon us in childhood, in school. Take for example, the idea of a friendship. We learn through school, through television shows, through external sources of what a friendship should be and what it means to have friends and all of these sort of things.
I'm using friendships as a proxy for everything here. But like take the idea of a friendship. What does it mean to be popular, to have friends, to have people that care about you? It will be triggering a bunch of emotions and ideas and visions in your mind that are pointing towards this sort of vague idea of what it means to have a friendship.
Now compare that to your lived experience. Whatever your lived experience, it won't ever really fit that ideal. How can it, right?
But the problem is that if we sit in this space of rumination, if we sit in this space of comparison, if we sit in this space of sort of judgment, we will always fall short. We'll always fall short on every aspect of our life, on friendship, on romance, on work, on family, on progression, on just about every aspect. Because what it means to, for example, be successful will be this ‘ideal thing’ - we've got this storyboard pushed upon us, an idealized, internalized conception of what it means to be successful.
But the reality of success is far more complex than whatever it is we've sort of built up in this childlike perspective of success. So what I want to posit here is that there is a misalignment of the ideals that were instilled upon us from our past, compared to the reality that we lived and what we are going through right now.
When Your Expectations Are Not Met…
When your expectations are not met, life sucks. I had this realization today when I was hanging around with friends and I'm like, ‘oh, I don't really feel that liked, I don't really feel that appreciated, I don't really feel that loved’. And then I realized, I actually do have all of those things but I just don't feel like I do.
I have love, but I don’t always feel loved. I have friendships, but I don’t always feel connected. I was sort of, for lack of a better expression, trained to think about my ‘ideal life’ a certain way.
I was raised on television, and when I was a kid, in that year, in that space, in that time, in that place, there were certain norms of what it meant to be popular, what friends did and acted like, and this was largely informed by the media of the time.
Also, school is this melting pot of forced social connection. You are forced to be around people all the time and are forced to fit their dynamics and ‘popularity’ - whilst you are also transitioning through puberty, navigating family issues, as well as mental and physical health concerns. It all leaves a mark. Skip forward 20 years and where does it leave you?
Well, it leaves me comparing my reality versus the ‘ideal’ that was never really true? My current life, my current existence can't ever match that, and it shouldn't.
Take the concept of a best friend, for example. What is that? It doesn't even really make sense.
It's a construct. So that, for example, if you had this value of having a best friend growing up, but adults don't really do best friends, so now that you are an adult and without a best friend, you are now ‘lacking’.
Accepting Reality
My contention with this entire post is this: perhaps you have what you feel you are lacking, but reality just looks a bit different from the ideal. The thing you're looking for, the thing you think you're lacking could already exist just under a different mask, just through a different sort of gaze.
I have friends. I have that connection. It's all there, but it doesn't look like what I was trained to think it looked like.
My success, the online success that I've found with my poetry books, with my coaching, with the teaching that I do online, all the things that I'm doing that are making me successful, the people are looking up to me for, that doesn't feel like or look like what I was trained to believe success would look like.
Because how can it? - You don't actually see the full story.
No matter how many sitcoms I watched, no matter how many books I've read, no matter how many stories I've consumed, no matter how many people I spoke to, no matter how many people I saw doing the thing that I aspired to do or that I'm doing now, I never live their lived experience.
The point is, you are never in their mind and you you never see it from their internal perspective.
Social Media Distorting Reality
It's like a failure of imagination. I only saw the highlight reel. Now we have social media, everyone's putting out this presentation of whatever they want to project to the world. It's a false positive or it's not the full truth at least.
Combine that with the algorithms presenting to you the different parts of what it knows you will want to consume and you end up in this echo chamber of false positives, proving, showing, directing you down a path of what it means to be successful, beautiful, loved, and connected. None of it is a true, full representation of the reality.
That person that looks great is in fact in the gym every day, dieting every day. The ‘successful person’ with a small business is grinding every day, working extreme hours and neglecting their family.
When you start comparing your reality to the ideal, you will come up short, because your ideal is a false representation of a truth that you're now living - and perhaps you already have what you think you are lacking. That's the contention, that's what I want to leave you with with this post.
The idea that perhaps the ideals, the constructs you grew up upon, maybe you already have what they're pointing to you. Maybe your reality is vibrant, just differently so. Maybe you need to look around, take a breath, get mindful and consider what you've got, because you are probably missing some of the beauty of your life by looking for, by hunting for, by wishing for the ideal.
What do you think?
Let me know.
