How to Stop Setting Yourself Up
Without being a soul-less stoic or dreaming less.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a 7-year-old who doesn’t become transfixed when you tell them about the Roman Colosseum.
A stadium built nearly 2,000 years ago… By one of the greatest empires of all time…That held up to 50,000 people… Showcasing gladiators, animals hunts (lions and elephants included), executions, dramas… And it’s still standing to this very day…
“Get out.”
If the kid doesn’t utter something to that extent or if their jaw doesn’t drop all the way to the floor, then you must — and I repeat, MUST — bring them into the clinic stat. That’s an order. Something’s got to be wrong.
In fact, two years ago I had the privilege of spending a few days in Rome. And let me tell you: just the pizza and gelato my first night there made the trip worth its weight in gold. (Side note: from that moment on, I could never look at Domino’s the same way.) But this paled in comparison to how excited I was to get up early the next day, have an espresso, and walk across the city to see the Colosseum with my own two eyes.
Everything the following day was ideal. It was a beautiful spring day — 65 degrees Fahrenheit, a light breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. On the walk over, I felt more like a seven-year-old on a field trip than I did a 20-year-old. I could physically feel an extra spring in my step that day.
On my way there, I remember being particularly awestruck by the trees that were scattered all over Rome (i.e., “Pinus Pinea”) as well as the sheer filth of the Tiber River. The closer I got to the site, the faster my heart began to beat (and the more street vendors there were trying to sell me on their overpriced selfie sticks).
But when we finally reached the Colosseum — the moment I had anticipated for thirteen years — the very first words that I mumbled were:
“This is it?”
The friend I was with shared the sentiment. We were unimpressed — no, we were thoroughly disappointed to be precise. Disappointed enough to throw each of us into a bad mood.
However put off we were by the reality of the Colosseum, we still went inside of the amphitheater-like typical tourists and took the obligatory pictures to share with our family and friends to remind them that we were, indeed, studying abroad in Europe.
It’s not that the Colosseum wasn’t cool, it’s just that we felt like we had been set up. All of the paintings, pictures, and history that we consumed about the Colosseum as children set the bar unrealistically high. No amount of architectural restoration, preservation, or espressos could have allowed the amphitheater to live up to expectations.
And if truth be told, I was actually more blown away by the Roman Forum, Pantheon, Spanish Steps, and carbonara that I had later in the day. (Probably because I didn’t have such high expectations for them.)
But make no mistake…
This article isn’t about the Colosseum.
Time after time, we hear stories of people from the West taking trips to Sub-Sahara Africa to serve those that are in need. Almost invariably, they come home from their trips and tell us about how the people in the communities they served have *literally* nothing. They may even go on to lecture us about how lucky we are to live in the developed world. Yet, almost without fail, they also notice something so incredibly… counterintuitive:
They notice that the people they served, whilst having next to nothing, are incredibly happy — perhaps even happier than we are in the West.
How could it be that these people — who have less than 1% of what we’ve got in terms of material possession and quality of living — appear to be happier than we are?
Well, there’s a simple formula that they understand better than we do…
Happiness = Reality minus Expectations
In the extremely impoverished villages of Sub Sahara Africa, they have very, VERY little. It is almost incomprehensible to the average American how people even manage to survive in these parts of the world.
Despite nonstop war, despite 30 percent of African children suffering from malnutrition, despite having to walk miles every morning just to fetch water… And despite their reality being objectively worse than ours in the West, they’re still happier than we are.
All because they expect even less from the world than they are given.
On the other hand, we have quite a bit in the West — perhaps too much. And despite having more each year than we did the year before, parents keep telling their kids that they deserve more, and politicians keep promising that they’ll make everything even better in the future. The worst part? We tend to believe them.
But as time passes, it begins to dawn on us that the utopia we were promised will never exist. For a lot of people, this makes life borderline intolerable. All because our expectations exceed reality.
My favorite quote of Eckhart Tolle’s, which explains how destructive this phenomenon is, is this one: “Belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.”
Does all of this mean that we should cease to dream?
Absolutely not. It just seems we’ve collectively forgotten one of the most fundamental rules of life…
The Solution: Accepting the Costs
In economics, we like to say, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” What this means is that there’s always a next-best alternative that you could’ve had, but chose to give up. Even the lunch that was paid for by your employer isn’t free since you had to give something up — in this case, leftover SpaghettiOs®. These are called “opportunity costs.” Sometimes they’re obvious; sometimes they’re subtle.
For instance, the obvious cost of a law degree is $145,500 (on average); the subtle cost is three to four years of your life in which you can’t do other things (like scuba diving). The cost of freedom is accountability. The cost of being a “people pleaser” is your own priorities. The cost of partying is productivity. The cost of getting in shape may be waking up an hour earlier in the morning.
The cost of ambition and “daring to dream” is the occasional feeling of disappointment.
You see, ambition and disappointment are like two sides of the same coin — you simply cannot have one without the other. In this world of abundance, entitlement, comfort, and quick fixes, we are under the illusion that failure and disappointment are bad things when, in fact, they are just feedback loops, data points, and lessons to be learned. Might I add “essential” too?
Many of us have come to believe that we have to choose between being an idealist and a realist. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If we only taught ourselves how to harness our expectations, we could dabble in both idealism and realism. All you have to do is accept the fact that there’s a small fee to be paid for dreaming, optimism, and playing the game of life: disappointment and failure.
Have nothing and be happy, or have everything and be miserable —these don’t have to be our only two options. It isn’t binary. We can ask (nicely) for the world and simultaneously expecting nothing in return.
Do this and you’ll never feel like you’ve been “set up.”
Or, you can be a soul-less stoic.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather pay the fee, play the game, accept disappointment when it comes, and continue waking up in the morning with the sensation that the world is at my feet.
