The downfall of expectations

If there's one thing that ive learnt, getting disappointed is a self induced result. Why? We get disappointed when our expectations surpass reality and unfortunately thats the case many a times. If only we can curb our expectations, for ourselves, our friends and the ones others have for us.

We think that we're unique, we're different and better than others because who wants to admit that they are mediocre? So many people in the world and if we are the same as everyone else then whats the value in living? We are the main characters in our own stories and due to the over-glorification of Hollywood we expect the main protagonist to succeed and gain victory against all odds. But life aint a movie, its the real deal. There are so many things in this life that are beyond our control and having expectations is the prelude of our negativity.

People say that expectations are the drivers of our motivation. And i agree but only to a small extent, more often than not, these expectations are way beyond our abilities and try we might, we never ever reach the goal in mind. We are left hopeless, depressed and tired. We are led into thinking we are failures because we couldnt reach our targets. Those high achievers who actually work their asses off to attain their goals get swallowed by ambition and lose their humanity while they try to maintain their hugh standards at all costs. Hence, i feel that expectations lead to our downfall.

Im not saying we shouldnt have ANY expectations in life. Im saying we need to have realistic expectations, the ones that occurs quite frequently. For example, if youve been getting 45marks for math you cant expect yourself to suddenly hit 80 by the next exam. A more realistic expectation would be around 50 and maximum maybe 55.

But thats the thing, people are greedy. We dont know how to manage our expectations, we yearn for more constantly and this makes majority of our expectations unrealistic and unattainable. Its really frustrating because its hard to change a mindset that's so inbuild into our nature. Knowing that we need to manage our expectations and actually successfully doing it thats the difference. I myself am having trouble having the mindset of setting realistic goals even though i know that expectations that are too far-fetched aint good for myself. Thats the crux of the problem.

Those thoughts you have in your head? The scenarios that you pictured in your minds? How many of those actually became reality? Must be less than a handful isnt it? Its tough because we cant control our thoughts, our mind wanders and this is also where our creativity comes in. We build our own perfect scenarios, our perfect world in our heads even though they are impossible to have, so we are left disappointed.

On the other hand, if we live in this world without any expectations, there would be nothing to look forward to. We soon get bored of our lives, we lose the excitement we feel when  we pray for something we hope to achieve to actually become true. Thus, we shouldnt live life without expections too. We need to find the right balance, the correct amout of expectation to drive us forward and yet not make us lose hope when we fail to reach our desired outcome. We need to forgive ourselves when we are unsuccessful, understand that the world doesnt revolve around us and move on with life, hope again and try again.

Life isnt a wish granting factory. The more we expect, the more we are going to end up feeling the crushing sense of defeat. What ive been doing is to adjust my expectations, reflect upon myself and those around me. I ask myself: based on my usual performance in a specific task what is my standard and from there set my expectation and accepting that there will definitely be chance of failure. I gauge my expectations of others too: based on my past experience with these people are they likely to meet my expectations of them? If not, ill need to reset my expectation and see if they meet those instead. I guess this is why the people we treasure the most can hurt us the most deeply, because we expect the most from them.

Maybe living life "Que Sera Sera" aint a bad thing. However i believe that life is not fixed and we have the power to create our own destinies

time is our biggest enemy

Time is something that is intangible but yet it is what our lives revolve around. Time is such a relative concept and it can hardly be described in words. There is never a now, there is only a then and just now because everything we do at any point in time will become the past eventually as the time ticks by.


I've always dreaded time. Not only because eventually my time will be up but also how abstract and ruthless it is. I know its not only towards me; whenever im having fun or actually enjoying life, time just ticks by inconspicuosly and suddenly all the fun times are past. Yet in times of hardship, time seems to crawl insanely slowly thay makes me want to scream murder.

We're constantly running out of time, so many deadlines to meet in order to force ourselves to be on task. This race against time is really killing me literally because i feel the need to hold on to every precious second in my life and yet i know its not possible. Time just continues its insidious march and causing us to be one step closer to breaking down.

Since a young age, ive been truly intrigued by the concept of relativity of time. Sadly, i do not take ohysics any longer and all the quantum physics concepts make absolutely cow sense to me. I do know however that scientists have theorised time travel by folding the fourth(or fifth?) dimension and this wormhole will lead to time travelling. This begs new questions in my head. Suppose time travel is possible, what happens to the altered reality? Does everyone's memory of the original truth get wiped away? I think not because it is a highly ridicuolous thought in my opinion. Instead, i think that perhaps there will be alternative realities existing at the same time. Each altered decision made by time travel will lead to another alternative reality from opening up, leaving the original one untouched. Still, this theory is also sounds really strange but its the one that sounds most reasonable to me. Well unless time travel is not possible due to the various repercussions that will destroy the space-time continuem. Despite all these possible repercussions, i do hope that time travel is possible because there are just so many things i hope to have done differently and there are so much wasted time in my life that i wish to reclaim.

At this point in time when time travel is not possible, i am always engaged in a battle against an enemy i cannot hope to win. Even though im productive for a fee hours, this will lead to the next few hours of me wasting them as i feel drained after being productive. Time i believe is a boundary i cannot hope to overcome in this current state of technology. There's just too much things to do in such a limited amount of time. This really reminds me of this movie that i watched called "In Time" in which the rich can buy time and extend their life while the poor being unable to afford time die at young ages. Hopefully, such a dystopian world will never become reality in the forseeable future. Everyone needs time and everyone should be given time, the market forces should never be used to determine something as precious as time.