Expectations make us Lose More and Gain Less!

We, humans, are the only living species that has endless needs from everything, including ourselves. The urge of our growing demands from some uncontrollable expectations keeps evolving. Our mind can get tired of everything but not from expectations because we don’t want it to take a pause. The more we get involved in something, the more we let ourselves to expect. 

I’m not saying having expectations is not excellent or unnecessary. Expectations give us hope for a change, to start something new, and meaning to our life. But like everything else, we’ve taken this soothing perception for granted. As a result, we’ve turned this beautiful power into toxicity and are destroying ourselves. Wondering how? 

Humans are considered as the best creature in the world. Still, it’s not enough for us. Each of us wants to stand out from others, we want to be the best. We always keep wondering why he/she has that, why not me! Why is this only happening with me, why not with him/her? She/has a better job, why not me? She/he has good grades, why not me? She/he has supportive parents, why not me? Why can’t I do this task as she/he does? Why is she/he is getting more compliments than me? 

Why can’t I have a lavish birthday party like she/he is having? We’ve let all these materialistic “Why’s” to take control of our mind. We rarely think of only ourselves without comparing our expectations with others. There’s no goal that is only ours nowadays. We set the goal of others. We expect to have a life like others, to be better than others. We keep competing to become more worthy than others of our same kind! And this feeling has made our daily lives like a never-ending race. 

Because even though we somehow manage to achieve something, the very next moment we think that it’s not enough because someone else has something better than me. Then we increase the bar of our expectation. After reaching the new hope, we start to count our achievement with others and then again find out that she/he has more than me! And then we begin to scream internally, 

“WHY! WHY! WHY! WHY!” With that one scream every other positivity, the success of our whole life becomes meaningless. And the feeling of losing more than gaining starts crushing mind, heart, body, soul, EVERYTHING! Have you ever wondered how much tiring this feeling of losing everything after each accomplishment is? How this feeling makes us think of ourselves as useless? We can’t even sometimes look at ourselves in the mirror, because we see ourselves as a failure in our own eyes! 

We start to keep hiding ourselves from everything. We lose our confidence, our concentration, and our smiles. All this happens because we couldn’t make our expectations to win in our imaginary battle. Yes, we lose sometimes. Someone else may have something better than us. I know it hurts. It hurts like hell. Even the sense of breathing feels painful. But why we’ve to sabotage those little sprinkles of happiness we gain from our small achievements. Honestly, we don’t have the right to do that to ourselves. We deserve to let those little glitters to make our day shine, even if it’s only for a day. 

Because no matter how much we try, how much we work on ourselves, we have to pretend, we have to fake our smiles. Then why not take a break from all those kinds of stuff for some moment? Trust me; there’s no harm in that. Even though we lose more than we gain, at least that pure gain made us a winner right? 

Written By: Fahmina Ahmed Papia

Fahmina Ahmed Papia is an associate of HR & Finance at Voice of Business and a Content Contributor in Pensive Stories.