Expectations vs Reality

I call it the Hollywood movie syndrome. An ordinary person becomes very determined into doing something, they follow it up, push and push, and it all turns into something extraordinary. Because we could all do anything we wanted, provided we want it bad enough and work for it.


The movie is supposed to motivate you to work hard enough to reach your dreams. The problem with this is that there are dreams that don't come true no matter how hard you work for them.

I read somewhere that you can measure happiness by comparing your expectations of what your life should be to what it actually is. Assuming that based on those movies you are expecting to be a rock star, while you're still serving tables in a dubious bar, you're going to be one miserable dude.

There has already been an article detailing this: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy . In case you haven't read it yet, please do. It's very good at showing why many of us are miserable.

But let's not even consider the extraordinary expectations. Let's not go for all those people who can sing and believe they can be rock stars (we all know how many of those actually get to be that). Let's go for the simple life expectations.

Our parents had families and homes by the time they were 25 or 30. Many of us are past that and still don't. Many of us are still single. Because the movies and society teach us to expect a fairytale love story. And we're dismissing everything else, so many of us end up more and more alone. Which is why social networking and all those sites specialized in hooking people up are all the rage nowadays, even for people who would never have touched those in the past.

I can give a historical example here. King George III had six daughters. He also had two sisters that had had some really bad marriages. As a result, he decided that his daughters would have only the best of marriages and systematically declined all marriage proposals for them. As a result of that, the ones who did get married did so very late, too late to have any children. Three of them never did. Their diaries were filled of entries of them watching their lives go by and missing the possibility of starting a family. (If you wanna get really depressed you can read about it in this book)

Nowadays parents do not arrange marriages for us anymore. We're supposed to choose our own destiny. But in expecting the very best, we refuse everything that is not perfection.

I'm not telling everyone to date people they don't like. I know plenty of people that are doing that and are just as miserable as the ones who are not dating anyone. (That comes from another messed up society expectation: if I'm not dating anyone, I'm not normal.)

I'm just saying: it doesn't always have to be perfection. Sometimes you can make perfection for yourself, out of imperfection. Just think on how you will be ten or twenty years from now, and think on what you will regret most. In the end we all have to take a risk sometimes - and sometimes the risk is to pick one imperfection to work with.