Since we were born, we’ve been taught a normal trajectory of how our life should look and lead to. This timeline is also encouraged by society and media and we live in fear of not being able to achieve this normal timeline. The problem with expected timelines is that as a human, you are no longer considered normal if your life doesn’t fall within the set timeline.
If we consider expectations for a minute and how it affects our overall mental health, we will realize that having expectations with our timelines will become premeditated resentments. By merely expecting something to happen will not make it happen. We can fall in the trap of not being able to distinguish between the subjective worlds in our heads and the outer objective world. Piaget, psychologist who is well-known for his cognitive behavioral theory, suggests that children believed that their thoughts can directly cause things to happen, this is referred to as magical thinking.
Somehow, we seem to still project that magical thinking into our adult lives and assume a certain timeline will magically appear because that is what is expected of us. Just expecting a timeline to appear when you want them to appear is called a delusion. When we add other people to the mix, it therefore projects expectations on the other person to behave in ways that is not realistic. But what happens if the other person has no interest in living up to the expectation that we set for them?
Expecting life to turn out the way you think it should is guaranteed to lead to disappointments and unrealistic expectations for yourself and others. [Please go to my blog to read the full piece and ways to live a more fulfilling life.]