Expectations so High You Can Only End Up Disappointed!

Expectations.

I expect we all have them, although — as I have aged — I have gradually learned to replace "expectations" with "hopes," because it seems like a path less likely to lead to disappointment.

I've noticed that in this day and age, people seem to have increasingly high expectations not only of life, but of everything they undertake. And so often things/events/experiences get dismissed as "not worthwhile" because they failed to live up to someone's expectations.

My wife and I periodically watch various "social experiment" relationship shows as a diversion when we need our brains to go slack, and one of the consistent things in these "dating shows" is that all the participants have an impossibly long set of requirements and criteria for the people they hope to find a relationship with.

Lists so long, in fact, that it almost feels like they were created deliberately to ensure failure.

Slightly sick and sad as it might sound, some people generally prefer failure and disappointment, because staying in a state of suffering is — in some way — familiar and comforting to them.

Of course, having modest expectations in life runs counter to our broader cultural pressures. We're constantly told not to "settle." Which is, perhaps, fine in certain ways but also includes the inherent risk of setting impossibly high expectations.

And so, I come back to hopes.

I definitely set goals, and I hope things will turn out the way I envisioned them, but in leaving myself with hopes I also leave the door open to the possibility that life is uncertain, and things might not turn out as expected.

In fact, they rarely do! And I'm really OK with that... better luck, next time!

Thanks for visiting!

How about YOU? Do you have high expectations for life and everything you do? Or are they more modest? How do you feel about disappointment? Do you eagerly try again, or are you put off? DO leave me a comment — engagement matters! Communities are built because people INTERACT with each other through the content that's created! This is SOCIAL media, after all. So share your opinion, be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer all worthy comments!

Sequence: 077 — Timestamp: 2023.06.29 - 23:08 PDT

All content and photos by the author unless otherwise specified — this is UNIQUE content, created expressly for this platform. This is not posted on other sites.