Postcard is a weekly curation of things I think are beautiful or interesting. Each postcard will be named after a word and contain something to listen to, something to look at, and something to think about. I welcome you to share any thoughts in the comments. Thank you!
expectation:
(n.) The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.
(n.) That which is expected or looked for.
(n.) The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to occur; prospect of anything good to come, especially of property or rank.
†Meanings from Wiktionary
Something to listen to:
“Main Title” - Jaws by John Williams
Something to look at:
Something to think about:
Have you ever seen a movie where everyone said, “Oh my God it’s the best movie ever, you’re going to love it!” and walked out of the theater disappointed? Sometimes, we fall victim to the gap between what we expect and what is. But do you think our experiences might be different if we were starting from a more neutral place of detached curiosity? Expectations of greatness can ironically become a blinder that obscures us from seeing the goodness that exists in an experience. Ditto that for negative expectations, which prime us to look for the worst aspects of a thing.
Our expectations about the world can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect bad things to happen to you, you might subconsciously act in a way that invites more bad things to happen to you. You might also avoid acting in a way that allows good things to happen to you. The fear of bad things happening causes you to shut down the same pathways that good things would use to reach you. You should only burn a bridge when you are certain that evil is about to cross it.
Here are some real-world examples of beliefs, expectations, and what happens when we try to avoid updating our mental models of reality:
A woman believes that men are selfish, untrustworthy, and primarily out to get sex from her. This woman dates a variety of men, some of whom express normal sexual interest at some point in the relationship, which CONFIRMS her belief. When she has sex with a man she is dating, she feels as if she has given up something powerful and that she is weaker for having done so. Subsequently, she acts in a way that reflects this belief, trying to assert a power she doesn’t have and finding that the men she’s dating react negatively and pull away from those attempts. This further confirms her belief.
Any men she encounters who don’t indicate a strong sexual desire or impatience to escalate the relationship into sex don’t fit her mental model. And so she discards those men (“What kind of man isn’t after sex? That’s not what a man is!”) rather than updating her mental model, which is cognitively harder to do (or, at least, appears to be that way until you become fully acquainted with the fact that you really can just fluidly update your beliefs and expectations whenever you want). Change is scary, man. People, especially past the quote “more malleable” unquote childhood state, are wired to revert to what they “know and understand”, rejecting information that doesn’t fit with their preexisting mental model of the world.
Here’s another example: I have a friend who is insecure about the fact that despite growing up in a wealthy, education-focused environment with a lot of financial opportunities, he wound up doing blue collar work. He feels like his lack of career prestige and top-percentile income makes him unattractive to women. He told me that he’s been on multiple dates with women who have explicitly expressed to him that they don’t care about that at all, and the way he responds mentally is, “Well, what is wrong with you? You’re supposed to care about that!”
Needless to say, those relationships did not develop and that friend is still single.
Our expectations about the world filter the information and energy that we allow in. If we think we are difficult to love, that love is scarce, then we will shut down any evidence to the contrary, including by rejecting—more precisely, refusing to accept—love. If we think that men are a certain way or women are a certain way, we will shut down anyone who does not conform to that view. Their mere existence challenges our conception of reality.
Our challenge—as humans in a world that is vast, complicated, full of mysteries and more than we could ever hope to understand—is to not let our expectations act as blinders to the wellspring of truth, good, beauty, opportunity that awaits us in life.