What if—via social media, our parents, advertising, popular culture, any number of things—we’ve come to expect too much from life? With attractive, wealthy influencers filling our social media pages, messages from our parents: “you can do anything,” and the fanciful movies we watch setting the bar so incredibly high, couldn’t that messaging be seen as harmful when so many of us fall short of those ideals?
Think of something that you wanted to do as a kid. A dream you once had. Maybe it was going to space, maybe it was learning to fly, whatever. Maybe those things will happen. Who am I to pass judgment? But the truth is (sorry if this is hard to hear) that they most likely will not. I remember when I realized the lack of plausibility behind my own dream to play in the NFL, it hurt. But what if I, what if we, had not been conditioned to expect to get whatever we wanted from life.
In 2017, a poll of thousands of US citizens found that 29% of people in the US expected to be millionaires at some point in their life. This harshly juxtaposes with the fact that only around 6% of US citizens can claim millionaire status. If so many of us expect, not just hope, to become millionaires, but only a fifth of those actually achieve it, isn’t that an indication of unduly high hopes?
The messaging that we receive, the ideals of the “American Dream” and the isolated stories we hear of people who get rich quickly have warped our expectations of what life should be. Since 2005, teen rates of depression have almost doubled from about 8% to now close to 16%. And while there are myriad factors at play, I think we can agree that the proliferation of social media and a new standard for life that so many of us feel we fall short of play into that.
The brutal truth is that while we as a generation desire wealth and the privileges it brings more than any generation previous, most of us will probably end up living run-of-the-mill lives. We’ll graduate, find a job, maybe find a partner, buy a house, maybe have kids, work until we’re 65 or 70, take one or two grand vacations, and that will be that. On paper, that doesn’t seem like the life we’re striving for. On paper, that doesn’t match what we’ve been shown, what we’ve been promised.
So let me make two arguments for solutions. The first is simply to change our messaging. If we tell kids that life is going to suck at points, that dreams don’t always come true and they should set realistic expectations for their lives, isn’t that fairer than setting them up with grand promises of all the future will definitely hold? It would be better to prepare them for the general linearity of life than fill their heads with dreams and images of a world that will undoubtedly fall short of their expectations.
Think about your life for a second. If you were taught to expect mundanity, might that not, in some perverted way, have made your life better? If you had had no dreams crushed, no epic hopes fall short, no illusions disillusioned, wouldn’t that be better? Maybe so. But reflecting, the cost of that—to have no dreams, hopes, or illusions—seems much too high.
Thus, we arrive at the second argument. What if we change how we think about life? What if we reappraise the value of everything that happens to us? In the “run-of-the-mill” life outlined earlier, we could fill it with moments as rich as any dreams we could conjure. The birth of a child, the building of a dream home, the memories made on that one fantastic vacation, falling in love, that decades-in-the-making breakthrough at work. All of those could become the things that we seek from life.
Rather than big houses and fast cars, yachts and bougie vacations, we should actively strive for the beauty of the mundane. I don’t understand why society (with our permission) has devalued living life in such a way as that. If we choose to love the life we have, it is enough. If we choose not to look over our shoulder, it is enough. If we value what we have been given and all that really lies in front of us isn’t that enough? To find contentment and meaning in the banal repetition rings truer for me.
We’ve been coached to expect so much from life, which is, itself, not a bad thing. I just believe that we’ve been coached to expect and value the wrong things. If we can strive not for a life of riches and grandeur, and instead enjoy the splendor of the “run-of-the-mill” I think we will be so much better off, happy with the humdrum.
