The Less You Expect, the Happier You’ll Be
New Year’s Eve, 1987. My first ever girlfriend had dumped me six months earlier, and I’d been moping around like a lonely ghost ever since. I hung out in my shabby student room (in the attic, with a communal toilet on the floor below) or secreted myself in the library. I couldn’t go on like that! I needed a new girlfriend! A sign above the entrance to Rütli, a restaurant in Lucerne, announced a huge New Year’s Eve bash. My expectations sky-high, my hair gelled even higher, I bought my ticket. Tonight was the night.
As I rattled through my disco dance moves, trying to be cool but probably pretty clumsy, my eyes swept restlessly from one end of the smoky room to the other. All the good-looking girls were there with their boyfriends, and on the rare occasions they let go of their other half for a few seconds and I threw one of them a smile, they acted like I was invisible. As the minutes ticked down to midnight, I felt more and more like somebody was slowly twisting a corkscrew into my heart. I left the restaurant just before midnight. The evening was a bust. I was twenty francs poorer than before—and I still hadn’t landed a girlfriend.
The brain doesn’t function without expectations. Essentially it’s a veritable expectation machine. When we push down on the handle of a door, we expect the door to open. When we turn on a tap, we expect water to come out. When we board a plane, we expect the laws of aerodynamics to keep us in the air. We expect the sun to rise in the morning and set in the evening. All these expectations are subconscious. The regularities of life are so engraved into our minds that we don’t have to think about them actively.
Unfortunately, however, the brain also generates expectations when it comes to out-of-the-ordinary situations, as was painfully brought home to me at the New Year’s Eve party. If I’d given myself time to consciously discern my expectations and assess them realistically, I could have spared myself the disappointment.
Research confirms that expectations have a profound impact on happiness, and that unrealistic expectations are among the most effective killjoys. One example: a higher income bolsters wellbeing only up to approximately $75,000 per year, and beyond that point money no longer plays much of a role (Chapter 13). Even below that threshold, wellbeing can be negated in a way that seems paradoxical—if expectations regarding income rise more quickly than income itself, as established by Paul Dolan.
So how best to handle expectations? I recommend organizing your thoughts like an emergency doctor during triage. Constantly distinguish between “I have to have it,” “I want to have it” and “I expect it.” The first phrase represents a necessity, the second a desire (a preference, a goal) and the third an expectation. Let’s address them in turn.
You’ll often hear people say things like, “I’ve absolutely got to be CEO” or “I have to write this novel” or “I have to have children.” No, you don’t. Besides breathing, eating and drinking, you don’t have to do anything at all. Few desires are grounded in genuine necessities. So, instead, say, “I want to be CEO,” “I’d like to write a novel” and “My goal is to have children.” Seeing desires as musts will only make you a grumpy, unpleasant person to be around. And no matter how intelligent you are, it will make you act like an idiot. The sooner you can erase supposed necessities from your repertoire, the better.
Now, on to desires. A life without goals is a wasted life. Yet we mustn’t be shackled to them. Be aware that not all your desires will be satisfied, because so much lies beyond your control. It’s not just the board of directors that determines whether you’re made CEO; it’s the competition, the stock market, the press, your family—none of which you can totally control. The same goes for writing novels and having children. The Greek philosophers had a wonderful expression for the things we want: preferred indifferents (indifferent here in the sense of insignificant). So I might have a preference (e.g., I’d prefer a Porsche to a VW Golf), but ultimately it’s insignificant to my happiness.
We now come to the third strand in our triage: expectations. Many of your unhappiest moments are down to sloppily managed expectations—particularly expectations of other people. You can’t expect others to conform to them any more than the weather would.
Our expectations possess very limited external force, but hold immense internal sway. Because we’re so lax in the way we deal with them, we allow others to gain influence. Advertising, for example, is nothing more than the engineering of expectations; sales is the same. When a banker sells you a financial product, presenting you with complicated projections of future cashflows, that’s expectation engineering, plain and simple. So not only are our expectations built on sand, but we also throw open the floodgates and let other people dig around in our sandboxes. Don’t.
How do you foster realistic expectations instead? Step one: before every meeting, every date, every project, every party, every holiday, every book and every undertaking, draw a sharp distinction between necessities, desires and expectations. Step two: rate your expectations on a scale from 0 to 10. Are you expecting a disaster (0) or the fulfilment of your life’s dream (10)? Step three: deduct two points from your rating, then mentally readjust to that number. The whole exercise takes ten seconds, max. Rating your expectations interrupts the automatic process of plucking them out of thin air, and you’re also giving yourself a kind of buffer, because now your expectations are not simply moderate but have actually been lowered fractionally below their proper value. I run through these three steps once a day—with enviable results for my sense of wellbeing.
So what should you take away from all this? That we treat our expectations like helium balloons, letting them climb higher and higher until finally they burst and fall in crumpled shreds from the sky. Stop lumping together necessities, goals and expectations. Keep them meticulously separate. The ability to manage your expectations is part of the good life.