Alternative Facts & My Approach to the Constant Struggles of Life

In my over nearly 30 years of experience on earth (if you don’t get the “over nearly” joke, watch the New Girl season 5 episode 2, “What About Fred?” - it’s very funny), I’ve developed a scientific (read: not based on science at all) approach to life that, over time, has helped me better frame the world around me and has even (occasionally) reduced my misery just the slightest bit. This approach is what I call "Lowered Expectations": the practice of reducing (and even eliminating, as much as possible) your expectations of any given situation in life. 

Having lowered expectations allows you to spend less time worrying about the future, and helps you focus on the present by letting go of your expectations of yourself and everything around you. This means less overall disappointment, self deprecation, guilt and remorse when things in life don’t meet your expectations. Now, I’m no expert, so obviously this is mostly stuff I made up in my head, but it’s 2018 and most things on the internet are made up nowadays, and Trump is president, so nothing really matters.

I genuinely (am trying to) have lowered expectations for what the impact of writing my thoughts down is on myself or anyone that stumbles upon this nonsense. That’s the beauty of lowered expectations: my productivity increases because I spend less time worrying about the outcome of a situation and whether it will meet my unreasonably high and unrealistic expectations, and more time executing with at least a shred of confidence. I imagine it’s an extreme version of this type of approach to life that has made Donald Trump so “successful” - he clearly has zero expectations of himself to be a decent president or human being, yet he keeps operating with exponential levels of confidence at everything he does. I’m not saying having lowered expectations will help you become the next president of the united states of america (although apparently we’ll pretty much let anyone do it), but theoretically, having lowered expectations could help you decrease the time you spend worrying about things that don’t matter and holding yourself back.

For some context on my current state in life (maybe this will help you decide whether you think this blog is any source of value or not): I’m currently traveling to India to visit my family for the next 3 weeks. I’ve wrapped up my work and my apartment, left my cat with my roommate (separation anxiety has already ensued - also it should surprise no one that the author of a blog called "lowered expectations" has a cat), and hopped on a 16 hour flight to Delhi with my mom. This flight will be followed by a 2 hour layover, and then a final 3 hour flight to Bangalore - where my uncle will pick us up at the airport and drive us 45 minutes through nightmarish India traffic to his very nice apartment. I figure being on a plane with the sound of babies screaming and children kicking my seat and the horrible headache inducing lighting is as good a time as any to practice being in the moment and invest my time in something I care about while blasting music as loudly as I can in my AirPods (to drown out the screaming). The problem with small children on planes is that they are absolutely adorable to look at, but they NEVER SHUT UP. Without fail, I am always seated near an infant that can’t stop wailing for my entire 5 million hour flight. At this point, I don’t expect my international flights to be peaceful - so I have to create my own peace by writing (that was cheesy, sue me).

The concept of lowered expectations was inspired by my extremely zen goal of having fewer expectations of my life, myself, and the people around me. This way, I wouldn’t be disappointed when life didn’t meet my expectations, because I didn’t have any to begin with. Having lowered expectations became a goal of mine after reading a bunch of self help books when I was terribly depressed last year. 2017 was an absolutely terrible year for me. Against all odds, Trump had just been elected, then my best friend suddenly passed away, I went through a rough break up with my boyfriend of 3 years, and then I got freaking psoriasis on my legs (if you look at my shins, it now looks like I was in a motorcycle accident, and it’s incurable - super attractive). It sucked. But 2017 wasn’t the only shitty year in my life. It seemed like I spent most of my life being sad because life didn’t meet my expectations. As a child, my dad left, so my expectation of having a normal and happy family was shot. When I got older, I dated a bunch of asshole guys who lied and cheated and were generally awful, so my expectation of what love looked like was shot. When I got to college, I struggled with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and ulcers, making my college experience far from what I expected.

Time after time, I was disappointed by my life, and it brought me to a very low point that I’d never reached in the past. I needed a change - so a year ago, I suddenly decided to quit my job, search for a new one in San Francisco, and move away from my hometown in the PNW, and everything I knew my entire life. It felt like everything in my life was upside down, and I had no idea how to fulfill any of my expectations of myself, even though I was making these big life decisions. I felt lost (full disclosure, I still do) and empty and terrified of everything. I didn’t know how to move forward with my life, I felt stuck and everything around me felt over-stimulating and overwhelming.

So I started to try to have fewer expectations of myself. It’s a practice, and it isn’t something you can always do as default behavior, or something that happens overnight. You have to consciously let go of your positive expectations in any given situation, because we as humans are programmed to develop expectations of ourselves in situations in order to push ourselves to accomplish what we want to in life (or something - I’m not sure if that made any sense or if it’s remotely accurate, but I think it roughly translates what I’m thinking into words). But I believe that we shouldn’t need to have expectations of a situation in order to motivate ourselves. We can evolve past that, continue to be positive and hopeful in our lives by trying to see the bigger picture and not wasting time on having specific expectations of individual situations in life.

Letting go of our expectations means we spend less time being unproductive and tied to hopes and dreams that likely won’t happen, we invest less emotional energy in situations up front, and in feeling bad later on. The Stoics have a similar concept: 

“‘the art of acquiescence’ - the giving up and assenting of how things are so that they can be what they are to become.” - The Daily Stoic

Letting go means we spend more time doing things we want to be doing, because we’ve stopped worrying about what we expect out of the situation and how badly we’ll feel if things don’t go the way we hoped.

Having lowered expectations of a situation requires 3 main things: 

1. you must objectively assess that situation  2. be present in the moment as it happens  3. clearly reflect on it afterward.

This mindset does not allow you to feel guilt or sadness because things didn’t go the way you wanted them to - because the process of reflection is not tied to any set idea of how that situation would go. Instead, reflection is just that, thinking about the situation and the facts of what actually happened, how you reacted, and, possibly, what you might do differently next time.

However, having lowered expectations is extremely difficult. On some level, I think that if we didn’t have at least some expectations of life, we wouldn’t have any motivation to live it - thus having no expectations is impossible. On the other hand, if you’re anything like me and you overthink, overreact, and beat yourself up for every situation because you have the confidence of a child that was raised in a basement, lowering your expectations of yourself and those around you can help you better navigate your life, and reduce some of the extra noise your brain makes - and allow you to “Just Do It” like the wise age-old Nike ads tell you to.

Here’s a boring personal example of how lowering expectations has a impacted my own life that doesn’t matter to anyone but me: I’ve been terrified of blogging for a very long time. Despite having been passionate about writing my entire life, wanting to write and publish a book as a child (and reading constantly), studying English in college, and leaping head first into any project at work that requires me to write in any capacity, I’ve been afraid to even try to express my real thoughts. 

Here and there I’ve written nonsense in spurts, letting the words tumble out like word vomit and blast into the black hole of the internet. I never truly tried to write anything I cared about or tried to be disciplined in my practice of writing because I was too scared. Whatever I’ve been able to write in the past has been steeped in misery, insecurity and/or insanity. I was worried about what people would think of me and what I had to say, what I would think of my writing and myself, and whether anyone would want to read what I wrote. It wasn’t until I stopped expecting my writing to mean or be anything specific that I realized I actually had something to write about - something that mattered to me - and that I could finally articulate my thoughts a way that I wanted to dedicate my time to.

Notes

The New Girl, Season 5 Episode 2, “What About Fred?”. Released: January 12, 2016. 

The Daily Stoic, “Letting Go is the Next Thing”. URL: https://dailystoic.com/letting-go-is-next/. Accessed: December 11, 2018.