Toxic Expectations
Three Point Essay #47 | Stop needlessly harming your own mind
Jeff Sullivan’s Three Pointers
I.
You wake up. You don't feel good, but it's a fresh day. Time for you to improve. Positive mindset, GO!
You sit down to do some work. But the whole time your mind is running to the future. You're fantasizing about when all the positive thinking you've done is going to make you happy.
You open an email from a friend:
"I got a self-help book you’ll love—it’s called Positive Thinking is Key."
"Great, I’ll have to check it out" you write back.
You then check social media and see a couple posts:
“Keep your hopes high!”
“Your dream life is right around the corner!”
All these messages inspire you for a moment, but then you start to feel depressed. You wonder why all the positivity doesn't help your mental health.
It’s because a more effective way to feel happiness and gratitude is to think negatively. Obviously no one would want to do this often, but just imagine your whole family dying in a plane crash. Or all your closest friends getting shot by terrorists. Or getting told you’ll be paralyzed for the rest of your life.
It would be awful (and counter-productive) to spend significant time thinking about stuff like that. But a quick contemplation gives you a magic flash of clarity. It reminds you how precious life is. It makes every second with your friends and family more beautiful. You realize everything isn't as bad as it could be—because things could always be worse.
II.
If you don’t want to imagine bad things happening to you or people you know, then you can just consider bad things that already have happened.
To do this, all you have to do is look at the 20th century:
Imagine you were born in 1900. When you’re 14, World War I begins and ends when you’re 18 with 22 million dead.
Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears killing 50 million people.
When you’re 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment, and famine.
When you’re 33 years old the Nazis come to power. When you’re 39, World War II begins. It ends when you’re 45 years old with 75 million dead.
When you’re 50, the Korean War begins. When you’re 55, the Vietnam War begins.
When you’re 62, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War almost ends life on the planet.
World War 1 in particular is something to think about. My friends and I sometimes refer to getting drunk at bars & house parties as ‘being in the trenches.’ Meanwhile, college-aged males a hundred years ago were literally in the trenches. Getting shot at, stabbed, tear-gassed, and bombed. Perspective.
There’s no shortage of other historical atrocities you can imagine yourself in to put things into proper perspective—an African packed like a sardine in a slave ship on his way to the Americas. A Japanese child whose family lived in Nagasaki in 1944. Someone whose parents worked on the top of the World Trade Centers in 2001.
Or atrocities going on right now. You could be in Ukraine, huddled in a basement while the Russians drop air-strikes. You could be in North Korea, toiling in the fields and starving. You could be in China, cold and scared in a jail cell because you criticized the government.
But you're not.
Right now you're alive. Free. With a home and food. And people who you love are alive. Right now. Free. With a home and food.
This mental practice goes all the way back to the Roman Stoics. They called it premeditatio malorum “premeditation of evils.” By knowing how bad things can get, tragedies or disruptions to plans can never break you—because you know they are probable. Things go wrong, and everything dies. Every moment in which misfortune isn't striking is a cause for joy.
III.
The only thing that makes people sadder than being shocked by misfortune? Expectations not being met. Shakespeare tells us that "expectation is the root of all heartache.” Why? Brain Science has some answers.
Neuroscientist Mark Humphries explains that “dopamine neurons do not fire when you get something good. They fire when you get something unexpected. And they sulk when you don’t get something you expected.” Think about that—most of the negative emotion you experience is a result of expecting something to be better or different than it really is.
Writer Morgan Housel also points out that “If an abjectly terrible situation can be offset with low expectations the opposite is true.” The opposite? An abjectly amazing situation that gets offset by high expectations. That is, even if something is by all measures awesome, you won’t experience it in a positive way because you expected it to be better.
The most dangerous of all expectations is expecting everyone you know will approve of what you do. Not to say you shouldn’t feel good if people do. But if it is the only way you can feel good, that’s a problem.
This again is a Stoic idea—the ancient Romans warned us to not rely on externals for happiness. Externals are things you don’t control. The opinions of others are an external. You feel crushed when someone you like disapproves or doesn’t care about some action you took. But if you didn't have the expectation of them applauding you in the first place, then there wouldn’t be any psychological pain. No expectations, no suffering.
Another neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman, tells us that “If your dopamine is tethered to the actions, words, and inactions, of others, you’re in for a rough ride. Conversely, the more your dopamine reward system is tuned to your actions and thoughts, the better you’ll feel (on average).” This, again, relates to Stoicism. Epictetus wrote many years ago that “If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.”
Expectations and desiring things you have no control over are the main sources of psychological suffering. Positive messages becomes toxic when it doesn’t take into account how good things already are. But knowing all this shouldn’t stop you from striving. It shouldn’t stop you from wanting greater things and hoping for the best. It’s just about awareness.
Great perspective!
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
I can’t even count the number of times in my life that I’ve said, “It could have been worse”.