Painful Expectations

Friends, we are mostly moved in to our new apartment and things are settling down a little bit (but not very much yet).  So I've had some time to get back into the blogging saddle--and I never stop reading, no matter what.

I just finished Barry Schwartz's 2004 book entitled The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.  It's another book that's worth the time if you are in leadership, if you sell, if you are guiding people.  Well, it's good for pretty much everyone, I think.

One of the things Schwartz discusses is the role of expectations in subjective satisfaction with the choices we make and the experiences we have.  We suffer from expectation inflation, Schwartz suggests.  The result of such inflation is ongoing disappointment regardless of how much things might improve on some objective scale.  Schwartz writes, "As long as expectations keep pace with realizations, people may live better, but they won't feel better about how they live" (page 184).

I wonder if there is a connection between increasing life expectancy and increasing stress during bereavement in our culture.  If we imagine that people really ought to live virtually forever, then any death will be classified as "too young" and "out of order."

I want to be clear at this moment.  Every death of a loved one is tragically painful, whether that loved one is one year old or a hundred years old.  I don't wish for a minute to minimize the actual experiences of loss and pain that we have when someone dies.  I do wonder, however, if we set ourselves up culturally for far more painful experiences than we might have if we had different expectations.

Many of us have seen the pain of parents when a child dies.  That pain is especially acute when the child is young.  I have seen, however, similarly intense pain from parents of any age.  When my dad died at age fifty-nine, I remember the words my grandfather repeated over and over.  "It should have been me; why wasn't it me?"  

We don't expect--in the Western world, at least--that our children will die before we do.  When that happens, as it sometimes does, the pain is far greater for us in the West than it is for people in other parts of the world--those parts of the world where thirty thousand children die every day from preventable causes.

The difference is, in part at least, our expectations.  Anne and I had discussed several times the fact that both our fathers died by age sixty.  We knew that an early death was likely for one of us--probably for me (at least in statistical terms).  When the situation was reversed, I was stunned into devastation.  I had expected something quite different.

Expectations drive both our disappointments from the past and our anxieties about the future.  Schwartz writes, 

"in this age of unparalleled longevity and control over disease, there is also unparalleled anxiety about health.  Americans expect to live even longer yet, and to do so without any diminution of capacity.  So, though modern health practices extend our lives, they don't seem to provide an appropriate degree of satisfaction" (page 186).

It would be worth considering how this understanding fits in with the current debate on health care availability (but that's for another person's blog).  That being said, our culture convinces us that we can continue to live longer and longer and better and better.  That may in fact happen, but that sort of progress will not make us feel better if our expectations keep pace with and exceed reality.

So what is one to do?  In hindsight, I would have been well-served to simply examine my expectations  about life, longevity and death.  In other times, people spent energy and thought preparing for their own deaths.  We spend that energy ignoring the possibility of dying.  That cultural practice does not serve us well.

In addition, I have observed parents who have lost children.  I am thunderstruck with admiration when I hear those parents talk about their gratitude.  I have listened as parents described how their little children seemed to have more impact on people in a few months or a few years than some people have in eight decades.  I have been reminded that longevity does not automatically translate into significance.  And brevity does not automatically translate into insignificance.

Schwartz has a variety of additional suggestions for how we can manage and moderate expectations in ways that will actually make us happier and more functional.  I recommend the book for your reading.