My son walked out the front door of the elementary school, descended the steps, walked straight toward my car until he was 15 feet away, then stopped. He had a lost look in his eye as he scanned the car line, looking for his ride home. I rolled down the passenger window and called his name, snapping him out of search mode.
"I thought Mom was picking me up," he explained.
It's incredible to see the power our expectations have over us. My son was staring at my bright red car for a good ten seconds as he approached and still didn't see it. Why? Simple. Instead of a red hatchback, he expected a silver SUV. This event played out painlessly. He got in the car after I called him, told me why he didn't see me, then got buckled as we pulled away. But think about all the times our unmet expectations lead to emotional strife. When the chain of events for an upcoming situation doesn't align with what we predicted, our brains flood with the same chemicals as our ancestors when they encountered a snake in the grass. At that moment, the order of the status quo is trampled by the chaos of a new reality.
In some sense, these events are part and parcel of the very act of Being. Every day we wake up and set expectations for our actions, however small. If I expect to make a bagel for breakfast, there's a chance my daughter ate the last one without me knowing and now my expectation of starting my day with dietary deliciousness is destroyed. But some of these minor inconveniences are so common, they barely register in our brains. Depending on my disposition, I may not even express an emotional reaction at all. I'll just have eggs instead. It all depends on the height of the "bar".
Let's visualize expectation as a physical bar we have to step over. It's pass/fail. If we clear the bar, we succeed. The lower the expectation, the lower the bar, and the easier it is to meet the standards, i.e. get over the bar. In the breakfast example, my standard was to have it. That's the lowest I could set the bar. When I narrowed that down to having a bagel, the bar got raised but only slightly. The main standard is still so low, that substituting eggs maintained the expectation of having breakfast at all, so my emotions remained level. But what if we were also out of eggs? And cereal. And my wife ate the last waffle. And I forgot to pick up more coffee yesterday. Now, the rage and sadness begin to well up inside me, and I write "childish tantrum" on the breakfast menu because apparently, that's what I'll be having this morning. Notice, however, I didn't raise the bar at all. The expectation I set was still quite low, but a perfect storm of unfortunate events conspired to unsettle the very ground on which I stood, causing my low bar to become suddenly unattainable. So it's still possible for expectations to go unmet when the bar is low, but it usually takes extenuating circumstances.
Those aside, we have at our disposal an endless variety of situations, each with its own set of expectations, and each expectation with its own level of importance. I sort all my expectations into one of three categories: low, realistic, and high. Each category has its own rules of engagement and is thus tailored for different situations. Low is the setting for the majority of my waking life. Every matter-of-fact operation that takes place, all the chores, hygiene, simple meals, and so on. They don't require much thought or planning and there are plenty of ways to check the boxes, so unmet expectations come and go without fanfare. On occasion, however, something noteworthy is on the horizon and one of my specific goals is to avoid disappointment. I call it the "never meet your heroes" clause. It's a way to consciously side-step disappointment by turning a high expectation into a low one. It doesn't always work, but if I'm excited enough about something, I'll at least try to invent a worst-case scenario of it exploding on the tarmac so when the event arrives, I'm still happy with anything better than a total failure. The goal of low expectations is to keep your emotions in check no matter what happens.
The next category is what I call realistic expectations. These are an upgrade from the low expectations of day-to-day minutiae and are designed to add some performance guardrails to necessarily correct underperformance. My realistic expectations usually come to bear on things involving work, both professional and hobby-level. The bar is still attainable, but high enough to take detail and quality into account. This also applies to infrequent leisure, like a family vacation to a familiar place or going out for a meal. It's not once-in-a-lifetime or ultra-fancy, so there's a chance to try again if things go sideways. This tempers my emotions accordingly and introduces a feedback loop for improvement when "next time" comes around.
Finally, we have high expectations. These are the ultimate in risk vs. reward. When coupled with ambition and personal performance, they're tied directly to aiming for the highest good possible. We're shooting for the moon. Without the highest expectations, achieving maximum levels of performance consistently is impossible. When we set these, we inherently understand that getting over the bar is very unlikely. Counterintuitively, this has a settling effect on our emotions because we understand that the goal is to get as close as possible to the bar and if we happen to clear it, all the better. When put in terms like this, it's easy to visualize professional athletes, virtuoso musicians, and billionaire CEOs, but each of us has our own high bar to set (and reset) as we grow.
There's a second version of high expectations, however, that isn't tethered to our actions but is applied to things outside our control. These are the most dangerous and emotionally damaging of all. This is the realm of external expectations and entitlement and gone unfulfilled, these are the most difficult to emotionally reconcile. As children, we have little control over our lives so we have less agency to self-impose our expectations. Therefore, we place our hopes on the things around us, crossing our fingers that the universe aligns and fulfills our desires. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to properly calibrate expectations when the outcomes are out of our control. What's worse, our immature brains aren't developed to cope with the disappointment of such outcomes, nor are they flexible enough to make on-the-fly adjustments. Having limited life experience doesn't help, either, so many times children set completely unrealistic expectations, only to be crushed when reality interjects.
My son doesn't get to play video games on school days. This is a rule, and he knows the rule. A new game he's looking forward to was released this past Tuesday. Can you guess what he asked when he came home from school that day? I thought I knew what he was going to ask, too, but he's also smart and sneaky and he knows we know he knows the rule. And there's another rule that allows him to play video games when he has a friend over. So when he got home that day, instead of asking to play the game, he asked if he could have a friend over. Loopholes, you know? The point is, despite knowing the rules, he still invented a scenario around them and applied his too-high expectations to an outcome that was not his to decide. And when reality struck, his inflexibility led to predictable sadness.
We've all come across adults who can't control their emotions. Childlike outbursts are called "childlike" because we're supposed to learn emotional management as we mature. But I believe to harness our emotions we must first master our expectations. They require constant calibration so the ability to be flexible becomes an essential skill we must learn. So whenever I run into a reality I didn't expect and receive an emotional jolt, I examine the preceding expectations to see if they were even in the right category. If not, it becomes immediately obvious that all paths would lead to disappointment. Hence the oft-used rhetorical question: "What did I expect??"