Equanimity

Expectations are a funny thing. We all have them, but nobody ever seems to find any real use for them. To have expectations for something is to create an idea, an image of what that thing will be before actually experiencing it. Now, the obvious flaw in that process is that without the experience, to simply guess at what something will be is to invite failure. And failure is a fellow who isn't shy about accepting invitation, or even crashing the party once in a while.

Ok, so the argument would be that most rational people don't make wild guesses to formulate their expectations, but base them on previous experiences of similar things. Seems reasonable, and really, it's a fairly effective method. Most expectations aren't all that much off the mark.

If that's the case, what's my point?

My problem is that I cannot seem to formulate reasonable expectations for myself. I know certain things about myself, and I sometimes like to fancy that I spend more brainpower obsessing over my internal world than most people possess in their lifetimes. The tricky bit is that I find my life to become more complicated when I start to introduce more of what I think I know about myself into the picture. I cannot claim to know very much about other people, only what they choose to expose to me. Plenty of extrapolation is possible, and is carried out, but that is nothing more than guesswork. So I can only apply my knowledge of myself to the situations about me, even if that knowledge includes what I think about other people.

When I was younger, life was much simpler. I did not worry so much about stuff. My interests were fairly simple, to accomplish what I may within my limitations. Think of it in terms of a maximisation problem. Given such and such restrictions, find the maximum of a function. So I scurried about trying to satisfy visceral urges, doing whatever I felt like, really. The path of least resistance, to a large degree, for to simply do whatever you feel like within the confines of what you're expected to do, is really the easiest thing in the world.

For some reason, I had to make things more difficult. I began to question the variables in my problem. So by examining those variables, I started to introduce more variables to compensate for the inadequacies of my previous problem sets. Slowly, the problem became gargantuan, impossible to solve. I hardly knew how the function behaved, no clue as to how to read it. I didn't know what I wanted. It seemed I would simply flutter about inside the function, never knowing whether I had reached the maximum or not.

Bleak as that may sound, things have gotten more depressing.

Today, I have come to the conclusion that there is no point at all in trying to stay within the problem. It doesn't matter what happens in that function. I cannot honestly say I care.

I was asked last night about what I wanted to do before I died. As I tossed out things such as private jets and ice-breakers through the North Pole and other such nonsense, I realised there was nothing I really wanted to do in life. One way of looking at it is that I can die today and be as content with my life as I would if I were to die 60 years later. After all, if there is nothing I really want to accomplish, then there is no urge to accomplish anything. As I put it, since I absolutely believe that I can be immensely successful if I wanted it, there is no need to actually go out and succeed. I don't need the validation of achieving a successful career. I would be happier if I simply won the lottery instead of having to work for my millions. Why can't I just get what I want in life? Some people want to achieve things, to make their fellow man admire their accomplishments. I just want money to make my life as pleasant as possible before I die. Even so, if my life turns out to be poor and squalid, I think I would handle it with equanimity. I would probably accept it and plough on. No burning resentment of those with more, no steely determination to better myself, no self-hatred for failing. I would pretty much shrug and get on with it, I think. That's a large part of why I don't think I'll ever get married. Too much apathy to share with someone. It would be horrendously unfair. I suppose it is possible that I just fall madly in love one day and completely forget that I don't care, to make the object of my passion the reason for my existence, to blind myself to what I would be subjecting her to. Then again, I suppose not.

Nothing too involved today. I don't feel like it.