[Not so] Great Expectations

Some people are coy about therapy and speak about it with a kind of polite distance, as though it sits just outside the edges of their real life. I’ve never quite seen it that way. In fact, I'm very vocal about how grateful I am to have a therapist that has, in ways both subtle and profound, helped me change my life (and my brain) for the better.

Over the years we've worked together, one idea in particular surfaced again and again in our conversations, until I began to realise how much of my inner life it touched. The topic? Expectations, or more precisely, an exploration into how much of our suffering comes from the expectations we place on ourselves, and those around us.

Though I’m tempted to credit my therapist with a near god-like tier of wisdom, this particular idea isn’t entirely hers. It draws from the quietly radical Buddhist notion that peace begins where expectations end. On first glance, it's a concept or belief that is both wildly liberating and faintly unsettling, but it was through her, in the texture of ordinary conversations about work, relationships, and the small frictions of daily life, that it truly began to make sense to me.

When she first spoke to me about it, I really resisted it because it sounds too neat and too absolute. If you remove expectations, what remains? Isn’t that just another way of saying: expect nothing, accept everything? But that doesn't quite hold up, beccause the more we talked, the clearer it became that expectations and standards - two things I had always treated as interchangeable - are not the same thing at all.

If I’m honest, expectations were so embedded in my everyday thinking that I barely noticed them. For as long as I remember I have always placed enormous expectations on myself: to perform well at school, then at uni, then at work, to be sharp and articulate in conversation, to be someone others found engaging, funny, competent, impressive. Even social events were wildly unrelaxing for me because I expected myself to be the "high-energy friend" that would please and delight - if I felt I'd missed the mark, I'd go to bed in a spiral of thoughts that would go something like this: "I'll never be invited again, what the hell is wrong with me, god I was so boring, in fact, I am boring, I have nothing to say, everything fun about me is a facade" - yeah it was pretty bleak...

“Performance” is also a word workplaces use so casually, as though human beings can be reduced to outputs and evaluations, which only goes to deepen the set of expectations an individual already sets for themself. Performance at work then becomes internalised and you start to double down on measuring your own worth in the same language - am I doing well enough, saying the right thing, being enough? And it didn’t stop there. I had expectations of friends (how they should show up, how consistently, how intuitively) expectations of relationships (how they should unfold, how they should feel, what they should give back). It was a whole architecture of invisible demands, placed on myself and on others, quietly shaping how I moved through the world and fuck was it making me miserable.

Over time I have come to think of expectations as a set of fixed narratives we tell ourselves about the future that become subtle contracts dictating the terms of our happiness: if this happens, then I will be happy; if that works out, then I will feel secure; if I achieve this, then I'll be good enough; if this person behaves as I think they should, then everything will be okay. Sometimes, these expectations sit so deeply within our pysche we rarely notice ourselves making such agreements, and rarer still do we question whether the world has any intention of signing them. And so life unfolds, as it always does, indifferent to the weight of our terms.

I'm not so interested in the feeling of peril that occurs when things don't align with what we wanted and more interested in the uncanny misalignment that takes place when things do meet our expectations. The achievement lands but feels curiously insufficient, the longed-for job arrives, but it carries new irritations or the relationship steadies, but does not deliver the sense of completion we imagined. This is because expecations constantly shift the horizon, turning "what is" into "what is not quite enough" and so we end up expecting more and more of ourselves, the world and eachother. This is the quiet tyranny of expectations: they do not merely shape outcomes, they make the present contingent on a future that has not yet happened, and may never happen at all. And yet, to abandon expectations altogether raises an uncomfortable question - what then becomes of our standards? Surely we are not meant to accept everything, surely there must be some line we hold?

Well, I've thought long and hard about the difference between expectations and standards and have finally reached a comfortable conclusion: where expectations reach outwards, trying to bend the world towards us with an iron grasp, standards are inward-facing commitments that we make to ourselves. So where expectations say: this person should behave in this way; this situation should resolve like that, standards say: if this is not met, I will respond accordingly.

The distinction is subtle, but it changes everything. Let's consider a romantic relationship that repeatedly disappoints. Expectations keep us suspended in a kind of hopeful tension: next time will be different, they will show up, they will understand because I expect them to change. Often this means, we wait, and we forgive, and then get let down again. Standards, by contrast, are less forceful in that they observe, they clarify and eventually they decide what is acceptable and what is not. It might mean stepping back, investing less, or quietly acknowledging that what we once called a close friendship or a good relationship no longer holds. Let's take that romantic relationship as an example to demonstrate this.

I once dated someone who was, in many ways, very lovely but whenever we were out with my friends or even just at dinner together, I found myself really frustrated because I wanted her to be more outgoing, more animated and to meet the moment in the way I imagined it should be met. This meant I often felt like I was carrying the energy, doing the social “lifting,” and quietly resented her for not stepping into the role I had, without ever saying it out loud, assigned to her. Retrospectively it's obvious how unfair that was. I wasn’t responding to who she actually was - I was measuring her against an expectation she had never agreed to and trying, in subtle ways, to bend her into someone else. What I hadn’t yet articulated to myself was that I had a standard, not an expectation: I need a partner who can meet me socially, who can make me laugh and who feels at ease around my friends. That isn’t a demand placed on someone else, it’s a recognition of what works for me and once you see it that way, the question isn’t “why aren’t they different?” but “is this aligned, or not?”

Standards, in that sense, are far more honest. They don’t try to reshape reality but instead, help you respond to it. That's where the paradox sits: standards are gentler because they stop demanding that others become who you need/want them to be, but firmer because they require you to face what is actually there. Often this brings less insistence and less bitterness, because you are no longer forcing alignment, you are simply recognising whether it exists, and acting from that truth.

So, to let go of expectations, then, is not to lower the bar but instead, to stop pretending that others will meet that bar simply because we wish they would. This is the deeper invitation behind the idea that peace begins where expectations end. It is not a call to disengage from life, but to engage with it more honestly and to act with care and intention, while releasing the demand that outcomes conform to our designs. We can still work hard, still love deeply and still move toward the things that matter to us but we do so without fastening our sense of wellbeing to the result. In doing so, we trade certainty for openness, and control for presence.

When I went through a hellish 2025, this dismantling of expectations stopped being an abstract idea and became something I had to practice, deliberately and imperfectly. Part of what forced that shift was recognising how tightly my expectations had been intertwined with perfectionism. I wasn’t just hoping things would go well; I was quietly insisting they go right - that my work would be perfect, that I would come across well, that decisions would lead somewhere coherent and upward. And when that didn’t happen, as it inevitably doesn’t, you don’t just feel disappointed, you feel completely paralaysed and unable to act, because anything less than the imagined "perfect" outcome feels like unrecoverable failure.

My 2026 has been wildly different, not just because I let go of things that were making me miserable but because I let go of certain expectations that had previously bound me. The result has been quietly transformative. I no longer feel trapped inside a cage of my own thoughts, measuring everything against how it was supposed to be. Instead, I find myself more open to the world as it is, and to the possibilities it keeps offering up. With that openness comes a real sense of relief and dare I say it, peace..!

This is because possibility doesn’t insist on a particular future, nor does it demand that things unfold according to plan. It allows for direction without rigidity and for hope without the weight of entitlement. More than that, it recognises that while we can choose how we show up - our effort, our values, our way of moving through the world - we cannot dictate what comes back to us. And in accepting that, everything loosens (heck, even my chest feels looser living in this way): I've found that setbacks that would have originally sent me into a hell-spiral have lose their sense of injustice; they are no longer violations of how things were meant to be, but part of the unfolding itself. Surprises stop feeling like disruptions and instead become a reminder that life extends far beyond the limits of our imagination. Even failure softens slightly - it becomes information, or redirection, rather than a verdict on whether you got it “right.”

Sure it isn't easy detaching yourself from expectations because you give up the comforting fiction that the future can be arranged to your liking, and with it the belief that happiness waits just beyond the next achievement, the next resolution, the next moment when everything finally aligns. However, in return, I've found I have a clearer mind, a deeper presence, and a freedom from the constant, low-grade friction of how things ought to be. You stop asking life to follow the script you have written for it and begin, instead, to meet it as it is - unfinished, unpredictable, and entirely outside your control. Somewhere in that meeting, a sense of ease begins to emerge, not because everything is perfect, but because nothing needs to be.