Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. The last time something disappointed you, look again at where the disappointment actually came from. Not from what happened. You built something in your own head first, quietly, in advance — and then completely forgot that you had built it.
You are standing in line at the grocery store. The line is long. You are holding a bag of mangoes. The person in front of you is reading a magazine and not moving.
You look at the clock on the wall. You think about how much you have to do. You feel a tightness in your chest. The air feels hot.
You think about the mangoes. They will be perfect if I just get home. You are thinking about the taste. You are thinking about the peace of cutting them open.
You are thinking about eating them while you work. Then the person in front of you finally steps forward. You move. The clerk scans your mangoes.
You pay. You take the bag. You walk to your car. You see a friend from work.
You stop. You talk. The friend asks how you are. You smile and say you are fine.
You get in your car. You drive home. You arrive. You put the bag of mangoes on the counter.
You go into the kitchen. You open the drawer to get a knife. The drawer sticks. You pull hard.
It makes a loud noise. You curse. You cut the mango. You expect it to be sweet and soft.
But it is hard. It is full of fiber. It tastes like nothing. You put the mango on the counter.
You sit down. You do not eat it. You look at the clock again. It is later than you thought it would be.
You are not happy. You were not disappointed by the mango. You were disappointed by the mango being hard. But the mango was hard before you even bought it.
The mango was hard before you even entered the store. The disappointment did not come from the fruit. It came from the line. It came from the clock.
It came from the friend. It came from the stuck drawer. It came from you. You built a perfect afternoon in your head.
You built it from a grocery list. You built it from a schedule. You built it from a need to feel calm. You built it and then you forgot you built it.
You thought the mango would fix the afternoon. But you were already angry before you bought the mango. This episode is about that construction. We will look at the gap between what you planned and what you got.
We will look at why we blame the world. We will look at what happens when you stop building.
"But once you've found that what's in the box is small, it's hard to think of such a disappointment as simply the encounter with an unexpected. It's a disappointment, and it usually shows, because you have an expectation of what you would like to get whether or not such expectation was clear to you. I felt deeply sad when my father, someone so important to me and someone who I didn't expect to leave me so quickly, passed away. Did I consciously not want him to die?"
That last question is a trap. It feels like a riddle, but it is a simple test of how we lie to ourselves. You felt sad. You are allowed to feel sad.
Your father was important to you. He died. That is a bad thing. But the sadness you feel when a person dies is not the same as the annoyance you feel when a grocery line is long.
They both feel like a punch in the gut, but the reasons are different. You cannot be angry at your father for dying. He did not choose to stop living. You can only be disappointed.
You were disappointed that he was gone. You were disappointed that the promise of his life was broken. That promise was not the mango. It was not the line.
It was a story you told yourself about how things should work between you and him. You wrote the script. You decided he would be there for fifty more years. Then the curtain fell.
The script was ruined. You are not mourning the loss of a person. You are mourning the loss of the story you had about him. You built that story in your head.
You added details. You thought about the times you would laugh, the advice you would ask for, the future you would share. You built it all out of your own mind. You did not see the bricks.
You only saw the house. This is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau worried about. He was an old man sitting in a garden in France, watching people around him. He noticed that the more you want, the more you are going to suffer.
I do not remember the exact phrase he used for it. I will just call it the sadness that comes from wanting things that are not there. He believed that the world is actually fine, but our minds are not. Our minds are always looking for the next thing. We want a better car.
We want a quieter day. We want people to love us exactly the way we want to be loved. Rousseau said this is a sickness. We look at the world and we see it is empty of what we want.
We get angry. We get disappointed. We look at our hands and wonder what is wrong with the world. But the problem is not the world.
The problem is the list in your head. You might be right. You might say, "If I just lower my expectations, I will have no dreams. I will just be a robot."
That is the fear. But Rousseau did not mean you should not care. He meant you should stop confusing what you WANT with what you NEED. You want the mango.
You want the quiet afternoon. You want your father to stay. Those are wants. They are not necessary for life.
If the mango is hard, you are hungry for two minutes and then you eat an apple. If the afternoon is ruined, you eat the hard mango anyway and watch TV. You survive. You do not die.
Rousseau says the only way to stop the sadness is to stop acting like the world owes you the movie script. You are the writer. You get to decide what is good. But you have to remember that you are the writer.
It only is the state of incompatibility only when you think of yourself as having done everything right, and other having done everything wrong. Love dies when your expectation is not met. For instance, Tony, a friend whose life story I had mentioned in a couple of posts ago, had fallen out of love with his partner because his expectation was not met. He expected her to be understanding, to give him an unconditional support and love, and to be there when he wanted her.
I think he was a perfect match with his ex-partner. They liked similar things. They shared the same interest in many activities. The only thing that was "incompatible" between them was their expectations.
I meant that sentence exactly the way I wrote it. Tony and his partner were compatible. They were not the problem. The problem was the invisible file cabinet in Tony’s head where he kept a list of demands.
He did not read the list out loud, so she could not see it and argue with it. But it was there, and it was full of things like "always available" and "never judgmental." When she had to work late or was tired, she did not break the machine. The machine just ran on a different schedule.
Tony, however, saw the difference and decided the machine was broken. He did not see that he built the design, and he did not see that he forgot he built it. Let’s look at a repair shop. You drop your phone.
The screen is cracked. You take it to a technician. The technician opens the phone, looks at the glass, and says it cannot be fixed. The technician tells you the cost and the time.
You walk out of the shop. You do not feel disappointed. You feel relief. You did not expect the technician to fix it.
You did not expect the phone to be perfect again. You accepted the event as it happened. But you also know that the technician is human. He might make a mistake.
He might lose your data. He might break the battery. If he loses your data, you will be angry. You will be furious.
You will call him. You will say he failed. You will say he did not do his job. You might even sue him.
Why are you angry at him? He told you the screen was cracked. He told you the risk. He did not hide the fact that he could lose your data.
You were angry because you built a story where the technician is a superhero. You built a story where you are the victim of a broken phone. You forgot that a phone is a tool, not a person. You forgot that the technician is a person, not a machine.
When the story in your head does not match the reality, you feel pain. You feel that the technician has betrayed you. But he did not betray you. He just did what the job required.
The pain comes from the gap between the story you wrote and the life that is actually happening. This is how project post-mortems usually work. After a software project fails, the team meets in a conference room. They look at the code.
They look at the bugs. They look at the final product. They try to find the error. They ask, "Where did we go wrong?"
They treat the project like a mango that turned out hard. They look at the fruit, not the line, not the clock, not the stuck drawer. They blame the person who wrote the code. They blame the person who designed the system.
They blame the tools. They blame the process. They look for a single mistake. They look for a single error.
They miss the whole episode. They miss the fact that the client asked for something that could not be done. They miss the fact that the client changed the requirement three times. They miss the fact that the client expected the project to finish in two weeks.
They miss the fact that the client expected the team to work weekends. The client did not say these things out loud. They did not say them on a contract. They did not say them in an email.
They were in the client’s head. They were in the client’s expectation. The team built the project. They built it according to the requirements.
They built it according to the schedule. They built it according to the budget. They did everything right. The client expected something else.
The client expected a miracle. The client expected the team to read their mind. The client expected the team to be psychic. The project failed.
The team was blamed. But the failure was not in the code. The failure was in the expectation. The client wrote the expectation.
The client forgot they wrote it. The client blamed the team for not meeting a standard that was impossible to meet.
"So, here is the takeaway message: If you don't want to be disappointed, don't expect too much from anyone (including yourself) and from anything. Lord Buddha had said this more than two millennia ago. The only way to be content with life is to not expecting life to give you what you 'think' you need." I want you to ask yourself if you can live that way.
If you stop expecting the mango, the technician, the partner, and the future, what is left?