
The Case for Lowering Your Expectations - hprotagonist
https://www.outsideonline.com/2280216/lower-bar
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BrandonWatson
Happiness = reality - expectations

Remember that formula and you will be fine.

It's not a case for lowering your expectations, but it does set a framework
for approaching different endeavours. It forces you to ask the question, if
this goes amazingly well, how good is that really? Furthermore, it forces you
to ask whether you are putting too much energy into your expectations.
Finally, it's why slot machines (based on unexpected and uneven payouts) work
so well. :)

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rrdharan
While I don’t disagree with the thrust of your argument, the equation would
seem to imply that happiness + expectations = reality and unfortunately I
don’t think it quite works that way?

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corysama
OK, I’ll bite. It does seem to match my observations that if your expectations
are excessively high vs. reality then your happiness will be low. And, I have
observed that people in truely... difficult(?) situations (living in North
Korea/South African slums) are often still happy because what they hope for
are the basics of survival, friendship and family.

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hoopladler
I think there have been a number of studies showing that poverty does directly
make people unhappy, though - or at the very least, happiness is definitely
correlated with wealth. Being poor is extremely stressful. Being stressed is
not necessarily going to make you unhappy, but it's certainly likely to.

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Amygaz
There are numerous studies showing that people with basic need expectations
are stressed but not depressed, while people who don't struggle about
fulfilling basic needs, but have high luxury and social expectations are more
depressed. Same thing has been shown at a the societal level in term of
suicide levels.

Basically, the level of stress in a population or experienced by an individual
has little to no correlation with happiness. The type of stress, especially
the more insidious one, is probably more important.

Then, I'll add that it's all about your expectation. If we hope to put food on
the table everyday, and we succeed most of the time, we will be proud and
happy most of the time. If we expect to strike millions by being an
entrepreneur, because we all know that we're nobody if we're not an
entrepreneur, we will endure a roller-coaster of deception and small
victories, with no quantifiable bearing on our success or lack thereof...

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njarboe
Some people shoot for doing great things, instead of personal happiness. It is
unlikely that they hit their highest goals and are likely to be less happy
than most, but I'm glad a decent number of people go this route in life. I
quite enjoy their great endeavors and think humanity is net positive for their
efforts.

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erikb
I think it's true that lowering your expectations will increase your
happiness. But it will also decrease progress in the world. Happiness isn't
the only thing one can strife for and not everybody should.

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TuringTest
What's progress, if not an increase of happiness?

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thundergolfer
Even if we take it to be aggregate happiness to be progress, it can make a lot
of sense to sacrifice one's own happiness to gain more happiness for others.

We could measure a decrease in the happiness of a suddenly very driven and
successful engineer alongside the increase in their income, take that surplus
income, and then convert it into happiness for others by way of purchasing
critical medicines for impoverished people.

Summed up, it's possible for it to be good for certain people to decrease
their own happiness to increase their outputted value, and then leverage that
increase in value to provide much more happiness for many more than 1 other.

~~~
shoo
Depending on how one defines the "objective function" for progress more or
less anything we want (or don't want) can be rationalised

One perspective might be defining progress to be maximising the expected long-
term survival (that is, non-extinction) of our species. This framework could
justify any amount of suffering of individuals - what's good for the
population isn't necessarily good for individuals, and vice versa.
[https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html](https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)

If happiness is subjective, perhaps some individuals are naturally capable of
greater levels of happiness than others -- [https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2012-04-03](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03)

Another perspective might be to get a bit carried away with using accounting
heuristics when trading off happiness now versus happiness in the future, and
decide that a 4% annual happiness discount rate makes sense, so 100 units of
happiness now is better than 2 units of happiness in 100 years time (this kind
of valuation might be consistent with the human endeavour's response to the
threat of climate change).

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_mgr
“Happiness means nothing to me. I just want to have meaning and purpose.” -
Jon Krakauer

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ictoan
I feel this contradicts with the ideas about Positive Thinking and Law of
Attraction.

[https://greatist.com/connect/law-of-
attraction](https://greatist.com/connect/law-of-attraction)

Many successful people use positive thinking to help them succeed in
challenging situations. If you lower your expectation, then you will never
become successful.

I think having expectation oftentimes create psychological disorders what
Logotherapy identifies as anticipatory anxiety and hyper-intention...

I think key is to actually NOT to have expectation. Expectation are result
focused. What's important is to be process focused. And process is more about
thinking positively on each step. Or better yet... use Paradoxical intention
to face our worst fears.

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yjftsjthsd-h
Perhaps, "The case for _realistic_ expectations"? Not give up and lower your
sights, just accept that expecting the impossible doesn't make it possible.

