I don’t remember where I first saw this equation, but for a long time I kept in mind when I dealt with things such as work, relationships, or the state of the world. But somewhere along the line, I lost that perspective. I began imposing my own expectations onto the world, and with that came a slew of disappointments. Suddenly, nothing was good enough and everything sucked. I allowed the constant murmur of the internet to ruin just about everything for me and reinforce the idea that everything is awful. Why didn’t this tech company behave exactly the way I wanted it to? Why don’t TV channels make the shows I like to watch? Why did pro wrestling evolve into something I no longer enjoy? Why are horror movies so obsessed with mental trauma? Why did eshittification take over everything?

When you sit around all day and think this way, only bad things can happen. I mean, take the eshittification of streaming services for example. The number of words I’ve written combined with the dozens of articles and probably hundreds of comments I’ve read have done exactly nothing to fix this. There is nothing that is going to fix greed. Its not like one day the rich folks are suddenly going to go, “Yea… this is enough. Sure, let’s cut prices and stop gouging our customers.” I mean, you see that stupid Costco hot dog story online all the time, because it’s one of the very few stories where a company chose to keep prices low, of course, it’s all part of marketing to get people into the store to begin with. Come in for the $1.50 hot dog, and leave with $400 worth of crap.

The problem is we buy into the original ideas. The idea that Disney Plus is always going to be $6.99 a month or the idea that Twitter is always going to be fun. Our expectation is for rational conversation on the internet, which is ridiculous when the internet is made up of bots and folks chasing controversy. We apply our expectations of a rational, intelligent world onto the real world, and of course everything seems shitty. It just doesn’t line up because the world is anything but rational or intelligent. It has never been. We like to pat ourselves on our back at how far we’ve come with science, but the fact remains, we are still just an ignorant bunch of monkeys on a space rock trying to figure out why we are here to begin with. And it’s that sort of uncertainty that breeds ignorance, rage, depression, and fear. And that is why we will probably go extinct before we ever evolve past this delusional phase of intelligence.

Is the key to happiness lowering our expectations? I think it may be. I know when I approached life from a glass half empty perspective, I was more content. I let things roll off my back better, because I didn’t expect too much. And of course, if something exceeded my expectations, it was great! Bonus!

There’s no big ‘a-ha’ moment in this post, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before in a variety of ways, including my own blogging years ago, but as I’ve reflected on the past few years of my life in an attempt to figure out why did I start getting so angry and when did I start getting uptight, I can’t help but notice it corresponds to around the time I started having more expectations. When I started believing in the whole self-help “You can do this if you put your mind to it” nonsense. When I started feeling like I deserved more and that people should be better. It’s time to reframe my outlooks once again. I just need to remember:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations