Expectations

It’s Wednesday night as I write this, but I scheduled the post to be published Thursday night, while I’m out in the boondocks of New Hampshire in the White Mountains. I’m staying in a Dartmouth-owned cabin with my girlfriend and seven other friends from Thursday through Sunday. We have no set plans other than a long hike Saturday along Franconia Ridge.

Franconia Ridge hike information

Other than that, we’re gonna hang around the cabin, relax, drink, swim in the nearby stream, cook food on a charcoal grill or over a campfire, and just be at one with nature. We’ve all been looking forward to this trip for a long time.

The point of this post is to consider our expectations. With any trip like this, with anything in the future, we always have expectations, and a lot of the time our expectations turn out to be completely flawed. And that’s ok.

Here are some of my expectations for the trip:

It’s going to be perfect weather, highs in the upper 70’s and sunny (according to the internet). We’re all going to have an amazing time relaxing, talking, eating, swimming. The water will be chilly but tolerable. The hike will be strenuous but it will be unbelievably beautiful and we won’t have any safety issues. We’ll sleep well, the woods will be peaceful, everyone will get along and it’ll be a trip we’ll remember forever.

When I return from the trip I’ll make another post with how my expectations of the trip differed from the actual trip, and whether or not the actual trip lived up to my very high expectations of it.

In life we often attach our future happiness to our expectations of something. When we’re experiencing the event in the present, if it doesn’t live up to our expectations, our happiness can be diminished, even if “objectively” speaking, we’re having a lot of fun and enjoying ourselves. This applies to everything in life. We have expectations, usually high ones, and our expectations are often not met, and we’re disappointed.

For this trip, although it’s impossible not to have expectations, I will do my best to realize that whatever expectations I have will probably not be met. I do know that whatever happens specifically, it will be a great time. But I will not tie my future happiness to any set idea of how the trip will go. This is closely related to the outcome-independent mindset, which I wrote about here.

I hope you’re having a great day, and I’ll talk to you soon 😉

Read the update here.