Expectations

A lot could be said about expectations, but the one aspect I wanted to focus on is when what we imagine is worse than what actually happens. The flip side to that, of course, is when what we imagine is far better than what actually happens.

In both cases, our expectations of an upcoming event are different from reality. Our expectations are not there to change reality, but to prepare our mindset (and choices) for what’s to come. For example, if we imagine that something negative is going to happen, we go into that situation knowing that we have to be ready for how challenging and difficult it might be. And if we imagine that something positive is going to happen, we go into the situation with high hopes (or expecting a good outcome).

But when the opposite occurs, it upsets the balance of our assumptions and beliefs. It’s like when we’re about to take an exam, and it turns out to be easier than we expected, we wonder why we thought it would be hard in the first place. We might ask ourselves: why did we doubt ourselves? What was it that made us think it would be hard? Was it because of the last test (which we did poorly on), or was it because we felt like we didn’t understand the material?

If we’re about to take an exam, thinking that it will be easy, but in fact, it’s much harder than we thought, we would wonder why we thought the opposite. Perhaps the last test was easy, or maybe we were overconfident in our understanding of the material. When such things happen, we begin to question our expectations–if what we imagine can ever truly prepare us for what lies ahead.

It would be apt to say that our expectations are more like approximations–a hypothesis of will happen. From our catalogue of experiences, we can reason the conclusions that will follow given certain conditions and circumstances. But there’s always a margin of error to our approximations, since we don’t know all the variables–all the minute and subtle changes that can occur (i.e. the weather, the choices people make, the conditions of the environment, etc.). More than that, we don’t have a crystal ball, and no matter how hard we try to approximate an event given everything we know, there’s always a chance that we could be wrong. Besides, we’re only human.