The Stoic Guide: Expectations vs Reality
At any given moment, the story you are telling yourself is what shapes you.
At any given moment, the story you are telling yourself is what shapes you.
Photo by Henrik Dønnestad on Unsplash
Video animation of this week’s newsletter:
I always wanted to be a soccer player.
Ever since I can remember, my only goal in life was to wear an FC Barcelona jersey with my name on it. I used to have dreams of scoring the winning goal and lifting the trophy in a Champions League final. I played soccer religiously — sometimes for 12 hours a day. It didn’t feel like work at all. Every time I played, I felt like I was “finding myself,” I felt like I was doing what I was sent here for. On weekends, my routine was: wake up, soccer, eat, soccer, sleep, and repeat. It was the same thing during the week, except that I needed to “make time” for school. Soccer gave meaning to my life and it made me feel alive.
Then, one day, I had hip surgery and everything changed.
My expectations of the future started diverging from my reality. My life was never going to be the same and there was nothing I could do about it. I had two choices: either accept reality and deal with it, or live in denial of what had just happened.
When there is a divergence between your expectations and your reality, life starts going south.
At any given moment, the story you are telling yourself is what shapes you. It impacts your actions and how you decide to live your life. It affects your relationships, your perception of self, and everything in between. That little voice can sometimes be helpful in making sense of reality and what is going on around you. It is thanks to that little voice that you know how to act in certain situations and can create some sort of order in your mind. However, things can start getting tricky when that little voice is telling you a story that is not matching reality.
What are expectations, anyway?
An expectation is simply a strong belief that something will happen.
We tend to have a lot of expectations for the future. These expectations give us something to yearn for and look forward to. They help us set standards for what we can or cannot tolerate in our lives and push us to pursue our goals.
The issue is when those expectations are way too outside of our control. In my case, my expectations of becoming the next Lionel Messi were crushed by a hip surgery that I had no control over.
The Stoics: Control vs No control
One of the most important principles of stoicism is understanding what we can control versus what we cannot. These are the only two variables that truly matter in life.
When we expect something to happen, and it does not happen because of factors we do not control, we have two choices: accept reality for what it is or cling on to our expectation of what we think reality should be.
As you know, the world is suffering from a tragedy now and many things have been disrupted. While it is easy to complain because your expectation of how life is supposed to be is different than your actual reality, this can only hurt you.
Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, had a simple theory for life: we are all actors in a play written by someone else. What this means at its core is that we can control some things and we can’t control others. The things we can control are how we act, how we think, and how we interact with other actors in the play. The things we cannot control are the setting (time and place), the actors, and the different scenes that are going to happen in the play.
“Who then is invincible? The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice.” — Epictetus
How to deal with what you can’t control?
The Stoics define reasoned choice as the choice we make when we decide what the events that happen in our lives mean to us. When it comes to the unknown and uncontrollable variables, we always have a choice for how we want to look at those variables.
Darkness can be seen as the absence of light or it can also be seen as the opportunity to look at the stars in the sky.
The same event can mean different things to different people.
Stockholm Syndrome
Take, for example, the scene that gave birth to the term “Stockholm Syndrome.”
On the morning of August 23, 1973 there was a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. Bank employees were held hostage for six days. Against all expectations (no pun intended) the employees started bonding with the robbers. When they were finally rescued, they refused to testify against the robbers and even raised money to help their case.
The same phenomenon happened when Jaycee Dugard got kidnapped and fell in love with her captor.
Crazy, right? Talk about a divergence between reality and expectation.
If you were to put yourself in the shoes of the policemen trying to help, you would be completely confused. That is what happens when the reality is different from your expectations — life stops making sense.
Reality > Expectations
Ray Dalio, the founder of one of the most successful hedge funds in history, has this quote that is so simple, yet so powerful: “Understand reality, and deal with it.”
Many people tend to do the opposite (myself included). They tend to hold dreams and expectations in their head and refuse to acknowledge the facts in front of them. They fall into what psychologists call denialism: a person’s choice to deny reality in order to avoid some uncomfortable truth. Denialism can only get you so far. Reality progresses based on reality, not based on the story you tell yourself.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where your life is different from what you expected it to be, ask yourself the following:
What is true?
What can I do about it?
Am I actually doing something about it?
The goal is not to kill your expectations but to be wise enough to change direction when the expectations do not make sense anymore.