Keep Your Expectations Low
The Older I Get The More It Feels Like High School
I read a review of Bill & Ted Face the Music1 entitled Bill and Ted’s Excellent Midlife Crisis2 recently and it chimed in right along the lines of something else I’ve been pondering and joking with my wife about. It gave me just enough motive, alongside of my coffee this morning, to knock out this note. As a bit of context, the original Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure3 was released in 1989 when I was a sophomore in high school. I remember liking the film at the time even though I might have pinned the ‘air headed’ language as something sophomoric. And here I am now, middle aged, considering it again.
Aside from George Carlin and the clever use of history, I think the stoner-esque ‘be excellent to each other’ sorta motto was my attraction to the original film. Nowadays, I find myself now more likely to want to mimic that sorta ‘party on dudes’ attitude in response to middle age even thought I’d like to think I know better. I don’t want to do a deep dive on a pop culture relic here, but the review just further reminded me of an outlook and experience I’ve been meaning to share. Someone told me eons ago that it helps to set folks expectations low so that you always exceed them. It was likely in a business meeting where I generally ran into every new project with an unbridled confidence saying things like, ‘if it can be done, I can do it’. That person was right in every respect, not just in work, but in personal relationships too. Turns out that if you set the expectations low, that you can gradually exceed them along the way making everyone happy. I regularly use phrases like “I’ll give it a shot” or “I’ll try my best” even though I know I’m perfectly capable. Although I try my best to practice that now with business, I still struggle a bit to remember to set my expectations low with social relationships.
The recent events have really just put an extra amount of unease into in the air. I can sense it in my emails and general interactions with others. My wife is dealing with it too and we’ve started jokingly saying “remember to keep your expectations low” as a way to deflate some of the concern. I’m often accused by my better half of being too critical. As much as I’d like to add falsely to it, she’s right. I’ll subject anything to ridicule at the drop of a hat. I often wonder if I hold myself up to the same standards and where it came from. I try to tone them down with humility. I’ll tell the waiter that everything is great and then turn to my wife to say… it’s alright, the tuna is overcooked, there’s too much sauce and the like. I’ve come up with all kinds of excuses for this. The recent events have agitated my criticism so much that I’m having to defer to the low expectation thing as a defense mechanism for the world in which I find myself. I’m unsure why I ever really expected otherwise, but reality sometimes falls short of my expectations. Although perspective is often subjective, the expectation that reality will somehow change or improve alongside of situations is often untrue. If I only had that thing, did that job, or lived there, things will be different. I think there’re a limited number of circumstances in which this truly has an effect. My father told me one time that people never really change. I think he used ‘really’ to define the core personality traits that are often unrelated to circumstance. It’s something I’ve really come to appreciate. When I delve into a strangers personality, I’m often trying to asses their background. And In that regard, the older I get the more it feels like high school.
Even thought I set my expectations for ‘adulting’ to be low, I didn’t expect them to feel this juvenile. I suppose I should pre-empt that statement with the fact that I also felt that way in high school. I think the primary reason for this is about conformity and group values. It’s especially applicable for me living in a small town and having gone to a small high school. It’s now the same little cliques of folks running around ‘adulting’. It certainly doesn’t help that half of them actually went to high school together. Recognizing this has given me quite the advantage in that I think of behavior in terms of the same probabilities and understandings that I formed in my teens. Perhaps natural selection has wired us to store experiences in these terms and I suppose this is more of a sociological question than a psychological one. Regardless to say, I’m very keen on the idea that most of the adults around me still possess the same fundamental personality traits of children. Jockeying for social status, the need for attention, the desire to fit in, and the like. It’s just that these have manifested themselves into career level, net worth, social network, significant others, where you vacation, how well your aging, and how well your kids are achieving. I’m a fan of any literature or film that portrays the intelligence or sensitivity of children as superior to that of the adults around them. In many ways, the new Bill & Ted Face the Music is about exactly that on repeat and it has exactly the same lighthearted potency it had on me as a teenager.
I’ve found that the best way to break up our behaviors are to belittle them with good humor. I routinely mock business meetings, beguile so-called professionalism, sarcastically slander social status, prod at productivity, mock maturity, deride sophistication, and generally do my best to act juvenile in an attempt to subvert all things adulting. The ongoing reminder between my wife and I to keep our expectations low is just a defense mechanism we use to easily exceed the status quo. I try to keep them low because the older I get the more it feels like high school. And the more it feels like high school, the more I just want to party on and be excellent.
- Bill and Ted Face the Music – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted_Face_the_Music
- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Midlife Crisis – https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/bill-and-ted-face-music-keanu-reeves-alex-winter-interview/615772/
- Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted%27s_Excellent_Adventure