The Danger of Expectations
“This is ridiculous!” I said. “We worked hard to make this healthy dinner, and then you refuse to eat it. And what’s more, you have no idea just how good you have it.”
I was really getting going.
“Do you have any idea how millions of kids around the world live? When I was in Afghanistan, kids your age and younger had to beg all day long just to get some money or food. And when they got something, they probably didn’t even get to keep it because some adult would take all or most of it away from them. So you should be grateful and eat what’s in front of you.”
From around the dinner table, my kids stared at me in silence. My wife stared at me too, with a look that let me know right away that I was laying it on way too thick.
And I was, of course. It’s normal for most kids to complain, at least a little bit, about things like food choices and manners and conformity to what the adults around them think is right. While it’s completely within a well-meaning parent’s right to encourage their children to eat healthy food, it’s also true that my kids are wonderful kids. They overwhelmingly make good choices, particularly about the things that matter even more than food.
While they probably could have in this instance shown a bit more enthusiasm about the broccoli or grilled chicken or whatever they found objectionable on their plates, the real problem wasn’t with them.
The real problem was (and often still is) with me. I had an unrealistic, borderline delusional, idea about how my kids should react to our healthy cuisine choice. I continue, it’s likely on occasion, to have unrealistic ideas about how family interactions at the dinner table should go.
But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that my unrealistic expectations robbed me of my joy in those moments. Those expectations were sabotaging my ability to make sense of what was happening accurately, blinding me to reality, and, if unchecked, could result in a downward spiral of a whole mess of ugliness: anger, resentment, and apathy.
Expectations, Catastrophizing, and Avoidance
In a fascinating corner of social science that I frequent, people like me study the process of sensemaking. Simply understood, sensemaking is the process we humans often go through to make sense of ambiguity or uncertainty. It involves our attempts to understand what is going on in our situations, and perhaps even more interestingly, what those goings-on mean.
The sensemaking process typically begins with what we call an “expectancy violation.” When something happens that is outside of what we expect, we naturally try to figure out more about what it is and what it means. A car in front of us slows suddenly and turns, so we quickly slow down as well for a few moments. We don’t receive an expected job offer or promotion, so we may think about why that happened and other options about how we might proceed.
When we have unrealistic expectations—and I’m thinking mostly about everyday life situations such as relationships, personal or professional opportunities, or events such as injury, disease, and death—there are at least two potentially problematic outcomes. First, we might succumb to catastrophizing. Because reality is so different (typically in a negative way) from what we have expected, we may see catastrophes where they don’t really exist. This could negatively affect our ability to cope with what’s actually happening.
A second problematic outcome is that unrealistic expectations can be a form of simply avoiding reality—in both its beauty and its ugliness, in both its pleasures and its pain. Although it’s perfectly normal, particularly in traumatic circumstances, to want to deny reality, most of the evidence suggests that this isn’t a good strategy for the long term. In fact, avoidance is more often linked with posttraumatic stress disorder than with its positive corollary, posttraumatic growth.
What seems to be helpful is to be careful about our expectations for what life should look like or for how happy or successful we should be. The most realistic expectation we might have is likely to expect that life will hand us many surprises, both good and bad. Being less surprised by the unexpected is a far more resilient posture than having high expectations that continually shatter in the face of real life.
Tempering Expectations and Hope
But does tempering one’s expectations mean giving up hope? Does it mean that it’s better to go around always expecting the worst outcome so that everything is a pleasant surprise? I don’t think so. We can still have—and we must have—hope.
We can consider hope and expectations, although related, as somewhat different. While an expectation is often more specific—my children should thank me for serving them vegetables and lean, organic protein—hope is more long-term and general: My children are incredible gifts, they bring joy to so many moments, and through my patience and love I can increase the probability that they grow up to be resilient, resourceful, beacons of light in the world.
Even when things do go unexpectedly wrong, maybe even horribly or tragically wrong, we can still maintain hope. We can still—I firmly believe based upon personal experience, social science, and ancient wisdom—find meaning and purpose in the suffering we endure and how we endure it.
The spark for the ideas I’ve shared here started with the story and ideas in the video below. My wife sent to me, probably while thinking (quite rightly) about my unrealistic expectations at the dinner table. In it, Fr. Mike Schmitz tells the story of Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit priest who found himself disillusioned by the harsh realities he faced both in Soviet-occupied Poland and in Soviet prisons and labor camps.
One lesson from those experiences is directly related to our expectations—and in the value of radically accepting life as it really is, even when doing so is tremendously difficult. It’s a lesson that seems worth learning, as it can help us more accurately engage in sensemaking, which can be a source of strength and resilience in moments of difficulty and darkness. It also, perhaps, has the potential to change how we view everyday life, opening the door to more wonder, more gratitude, and more joy.