Great Expectations

I had to think for a bit when picking which day to post this. (I tend to write a week's worth all at one go. The "marathon sessions" writing strategy has been serving me well since college.) I figured that since Monday was a holiday, Tuesday would be like Monday...and I hate posting serious stuff on Mondays. It's not like you don't have enough to deal with already. I start looking forward to the weekend on Thursday, so I didn't want this to be a downer then, either. Thus I've sandwiched it here, on the most neutral of days. Or something like that, anyway.

I think that optimism is one of the best qualities of Americans. I think it’s also one of our worst. (It was the best of qualities, it was the worst of qualities?)

Without our can-do attitude, I imagine things like winning wars, becoming an international industrial power, and inventing the Big Mac would have been a lot more difficult. Even now, in the face of THE WORST ECONOMY IN FOREVER OMG WE’RE ALL SO GONNA LOSE ALL OUR MONEY AND I’M INVESTING IN GOLD AND SHOTGUNS, we know it’ll end eventually, things will rebound, and gas will go back to being $4 a gallon. Circle of life.

Yet where our optimism harms us, I think, is in our sense of entitlement. It’s the pursuit of happiness that is an unalienable right, not happiness itself. It’s easy to assume that everything should and will turn out exactly as we want it. But that’s so rarely the case.

This is why I try to keep my expectations low. Very low. I mean, that bad date doesn’t seem so bad if you’ve resigned yourself to dying alone. A mediocre episode of The Office pales in comparison to the awesomeness that was The Engagement. You may have chipped a tooth, but odds are good that your others are all fully-functional.*

The trick is to pick the absolute worst-case scenario and assume it as the default. Then when anything better than that does happen (and it probably will, unless you have the world’s worst luck**), it’s like a little bonus. Sort of a “live every day like it’s your last” thing, but with less shrimp. (Or would that just be my last day? Whichever.)

If you’ve braced yourself for the worst, reality doesn’t suck so much.

* Depends on location; your mileage may vary.
** You don’t; I checked.