Expectations Revisited

I am a big believe in the idea that one’s happiness is the difference between one’s expectations and one’s reality. I’ve also previously hypothesized that one of the biggest causes of my historical unhappiness is my unrealisticly high expectations of myself and my life, and that I might be happier were I able to lower those expectations. That might sound easy, but in practice it has turned out to be substantially harder than I had expected.

As much as I am enjoying this wave of newfound contentment, I am not so naive to think it will last forever, and it seems prescient to plan for one when things inevitably venture south once more. A good first step seems to be to try to internalise some new expectations.

The first trap is to think that if you set your expectations very, very low then you will be incredibly happy. If I repeat to myself 5x in the mirror every morning that my sole expectation is to wake up roughly once a day and respire consistently, then I’d be the happiest guy on earth. In actuality, our expectations run much deeper than that and are far more conditioner than at least I had initially realised. In all honesty, I’m not sure what the best way to change these internal settings is - but I think a good start would be to write them down, so here goes.

• I expect to wake up roughly once a day and respire consistently;
• I expect to make enough money to maintain my existing lifestyle;
• I expect myself to go to the gym at least 3x a week on average, unless I’m sick or travelling;
• I expect myself to eat less than 3000 calories a day, unless it’s a special occasion or I am particularly emotional that day;
• I expect myself to have no zero days;
• I expect myself to catch up with at least one friend a week;
• I expect myself to catch up with my brother at least every other week;
• I expect myself to learn at least one new thing about technology or my job every week;
• I expect myself to leave the house at least once a day;
• I expect to make slow but continuous progress in my career;
• I expect to make slow but continuous progress in the gym;
• I expect to make slow but continuous progress at chess;
• I expect myself to continuously try to express myself more openly and more honestly;
• I expect myself to continuously work on loving myself more;
• I expect myself to continuously try to learn more about the world and try to be a better person in general;
• I expect myself to write in this dumb blog every dumb day.

These seem like they are still fairly lofty goals, but perhaps I will have to come down slowly. Good luck me.