Year of Discovery (Week 24: Expectations and Not Knowing)

Though I age every day, this last week was a milestone of another full year around the sun. I was grateful to spend the weekend with friends and for the incredible gifts of their time and company. The way we spend our days is the way we live our lives and I’m grateful to have such rays of sun in my life.

This last week, I also spent time reflecting on the past year, consolidating what I’ve learned about myself since the start of my YoD and creating potential pathways forward. I’m feeling more excited as I sense check them with friends.

Today, I’m sharing a reflection on expectations and not knowing.

Expectations

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few months about the relationship between reality and our expectations. There are many memes that represent a comical representation of people’s reality versus their expectations like this…

…and oftentimes, the frustration we feel around missed expectations can lead to conflict, especially when we seek happiness in others and look to relieve any feelings of discomfort by blaming others for our negative feelings. When we pause and look deeply at our experience around missed expectations, we can often find that the strong feelings around them relate to our upbringing and our core beliefs about our ourselves. We may be bringing feeling ‘not good enough’ or ‘unloved’ from the past to the present, which can lead us to expecting more than what is realistic in a given situation to compensate for feelings of the past that still fester today.

Instead of spinning in a cycle of disappointment, what new beliefs can we practice and adopt?

1. The truth is that merely expecting something to happen will not make it happen. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget noted that young children have difficulty distinguishing between the subjective worlds in their heads and the outer, objective world — and believed that when they think something, it would come alive (‘magical thinking’). Turns out, many adults continue to believe in magical thinking throughout their lives. Instead, learning to communicate proactively (instead of allowing the other person or people to guess what we want and need) is critical even if asking for what we want may feel unnatural.

“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.” ― Neil Strauss, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

2. Human beings have a natural tendency to pin their hopes for happiness on fulfilled expectations. This is okay when it’s pegged on something that we know from past experience makes us happy (like our morning coffee run). But when we peg our happiness on other people to fulfill our expectations, that becomes dangerous. Many of us at some point have mistakenly believed that expecting other people to behave the way we want will actually make them behave that way. But the reality is that in each of us is a series of values, beliefs, fears and anxieties that impact what we prioritize and how we show up everyday. Expecting people to always do or behave in certain ways is guaranteed to lead to disappointment as if all of us act on our own desires and agendas, then it’s bound to conflict with others. When unfulfilled expectations involve what we perceive to be the failure of other people to behave the way we expect them to, the disappointment can breed resentment.

So when we realize that unrealistic expectations of outcomes and people lead us to resentment, then practicing awareness in the moment is critical:

• Being able to recognize the fears driving a reaction, label them in the moment, ask ourselves if it is really true that ‘I am not good enough’ allows the spell of the fear to dissipate over time.
• Being able to take a step back and see the ways in which others surprised us positively is also important to breed gratitude and a balanced mindset around a situation.
• Learning to communicate our needs and wants instead of letting other people guess and then feeling disappointed when they didn’t guess correctly.
• Being okay that even when we do share our needs and wants that they can often be unfulfilled because the other person has their own desires and beliefs.

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I,

and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

If not, it can’t be helped.

— Fritz Perls, “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim,” 1969

Not Knowing

A friend of mine pointed out to me on a bike ride this week that I often say ‘ I don’t know’ after sharing thoughts on a topic. After he encouraged me to stand by what I say more often and exclude the phrase, I went back to think more deeply about why I do say ‘I don’t know’. It seems to me that the phrase is actually aligned to a specific belief that I have about the world — that we know (and will probably always know) less than 1% of what we can know on how the world works.

“That your predictions about the universe are fundamentally constrained by you yourself being part of the universe you’re predicting, always seemed pretty obvious to me.” — Scott Aaronson, computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In my journey to understand what the future may look like, I listened to this episode of podcast Capitalisn’t. Martin Gurri, Visiting Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and former CIA media analyst, talks about the fallacy of ‘knowing’ and how, with the increased access to information, the masses are beginning to understand how little elites — or really any one of else — truly ‘knows’. In response to being ‘found out’, some elites are pushing to appear even more confident on their views of the future and where the world is heading, even if unfounded.

This year, as I’ve explored my learning questions through reading, prototyping and conversations, I continue to have more questions than answers. And I’ve wonder how much we do know and why we have so much confidence in the little that we do know.

In that, I often wondered what the value is of confidence in our society and whether it serves us or doesn’t. Confidence allows us to create a feeling of certainty in a mostly uncertain world and is what others generally gravitate towards. But because as a species, we actually know so little, I do wonder how much not embracing the not knowing is actually holding us back from listening, observing and evolving.

If mathemetician Kurt Gödel showed that within any formal mathematical system advanced enough to be useful, it is impossible to use the system to prove every true statement that it contains, then it means that even in ‘science’ there isn’t a clear truth to simply know.

So as a species, is the catalyst to our ability to evolve in how we cultivate comfort in what we don’t know, rather than feed an inobtainable feeling that we do need to know?

What I’m reading: Human Intelligence — Have we reached the limit of knowledge?