the Odyssey of Expectation

First, before you do anything else, check this song out: these guys are brilliant: Das Racist-Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.

Okay, now that I've said that, I'm going to try something new with this one. Bear with me. It's a work in progress. The idea of Neuroses is to discuss my insecurities in the most candid manner possible. The idea is to understand my life and what I'm doing here through some sort of human experience that others can relate to. Up until now, I've concentrated mostly on the minutia, running a microscope over these small matters that are really irrelevant to people as a whole, issues that cause the normal and average individual little to no concern. Hopefully, this one is going to be different. I've found that a few people are reading this, including family members that I never expected to take an interest in my Internet personality, esp. because (I guess) I assumed that they were all Luddites (dictionary.com says: Luddite: a member of any of various bands of workers in England (1811–16) organized to destroy manufacturing machinery, under the belief that its use diminished employment). I also was under the impression that nobody I knew from my daily life would read this, possibly because American culture is one of Ayn-Randean self-obsession, and we are all involved in our own stories, ones which require the utmost attention, not leaving much room for the ambitions of others. And, even more so, time is so valuable when you really start living an adult life, when every responsibility rests on your shoulders, and there is a sense of urgency in your few moments of real, personal pursuit.

This one's about expectation--Hopefully, I can keep it engaging without resorting to witticisms or poor attempts at flare (wish me luck). I think anyone would agree that when we are young, we start forming expectations about who and what we are shaping up to be, what we are going to achieve, what resources we are going to have on the way, and how we are planning on living up to those expectations. I also think that if you made a pie chart of how we actually turned out in regards to our expectations when we were, say, 14, we would find that it would look much like a monochromatic black circle, just sitting there with a key that read: Black = didn't live up to expectations. Now, I'll try not to equate expectation with success. I don't really think that this is a discussion of success, and I'm sure that that's the first thing that would pop into the mind of someone who's actually read this far. I think success is a mere aspect (1/1,000,000,000) of how we gauge our expectations. Success might hog the spotlight more often than others, but we're all acting upon more considerations than are really calculable, even if these considerations aren't always on the forefront of our minds. Even so, we all know the guy/gal from high school who was just brimming with potential, I mean really going places, and we all though "hey, at least we know that person is going to make it," but when I look back at how I behaved in high school in relation to the expectations I had for myself, I guess I just always assumed that things would work themselves out in the end, and I think a lot of us do that. It's easy to drop off at some point, pull in to a pit stop, and settle down. This can be a pretty disheartening prospect, the prospect of settling for something other than what we had in mind for ourselves. But that doesn't always mean that diverting from our goals is a bad thing. It we drift away from one path to pick up on another, fresher course of development, we've traded up, and that is always preferable to stagnation.

The easy thing to do is to say, "it doesn't really matter. Once I'm dead, I'll cease existing, and it won't matter if I was a gas station attendant or a political leader. It won't matter if I was married with four children or I died alone. I will simply not be." Or, on the other end, "it doesn't matter. My rewards are awaiting me in heaven." But this kind of thinking is caustic to our goals. It eats away at what we want from life, and when you really think about it--I mean, when you really get down to the crux of it--all we have is a finite number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. When we are born, somebody starts a doomsday clock somewhere in a metaphysical bureaucracy that we can't begin to understand, and if we don't do exactly what we want in this life, somewhere along the line, we will regret it. I don't know; maybe this is all a bit too bleak, but thinking this way can be motivational, even if it is stressful to constantly be aware of your own biological clock counting down somewhere in the corporate headquarters of the universe.