Expectations

Expectations are a dangerous thing - the expectations others have of us, the expectations we have of ourselves (and others), and the expectations we have of the future. While these many forms of expectations deserve attention, let me concentrate on the last one for a moment - expectations we have of the future. I took my kids to a (minor league) baseball game for the first time this past weekend. We watched the San Jose Giants play the Stockton Ports and the kids got to go down to the field and run the bases afterwards (it was a promotional evening). It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and this is one of the things I decided I wanted to do to celebrate. The other thing I wanted to do was take the kids to a movie. Rather than go to the theater, we borrowed Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird from the library and watched it at my work (in a large conference room with an overhead projector and ceiling-mounted speakers).

I had such high hopes for both events. I envisioned the kids being all excited about the special activities, sitting through them without too many interruptions, and remembering the events fondly afterwards - real father/son bonding moments. I think the events took on even more significance in my mind since it was the kids' first time doing either activity and since my family never did this kind of stuff when I was growing up.

In hindsight, it's not surprising that neither event lived up to my expectations. Charlotte Bronte said that "life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation". In fact, I can't think of a single situation in which I got my hopes up for something and the actual event met or exceeded my expectations. There are plenty of times where my expectations were low and I've been pleasantly surprised. But not a single event that I've expected to be off-the-charts good has lived up to that billing. I guess Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were right when they said "blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed". I've often thought that I shouldn't get my hopes up since I'll only be disappointed in the end. But that seems like such a pathetic way to go through life that I haven't been able to fully embrace it.

I came across an interesting book the other day that sheds a little light on this. My friend GC is part of the TED book club and had Stumbling on Happiness sitting on his desk. It looked good - endorsed by Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), Steven Levitt (Freakonomics), and Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) - so I asked GC if I could borrow the book. As the author explains in the foreword, "this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy." Given the frontal lobes of our brains, human beings are the only animal that think about the future - not just predicting what will happen next (e.g., "last time I smelled this smell, a big thing tried to eat me") but genuinely imagining the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be. This is a mixed blessing...

What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future. We feel anxiety when we anticipate that something bad will happen, and we plan by imagining how our actions will unfold over time. Planning requires that we peer into our futures, and anxiety is one of the reactions we may have when we do. The fact that damage to the frontal lobe impairs planning and anxiety so uniquely and precisely suggests that the front lobe is the critical piece of cerebral machinery that allows normal, modern human adults to project themselves into the future. Without it we are trapped in the moment, unable to imagine tomorrow and hence unworried about what it may bring. (pg 14)

Human beings actually spend about 12% of their daily thoughts thinking about the future. It's pleasurable to daydream about the future since we tend to imagine ourselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing. As the author points out, though:

Although imagining happy futures may make us feel happy, it can also have some troubling consequences. Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur. Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good events than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures (pg 18) ... In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they control events in most situations. (pg 22)

Can't wait to read the rest of this book. I'm only 26 pages (10.9%) of my way through it so far but I think it will be a really worthwhile read.