If there ever was a time to lower our expectations, it’s probably the tail end of 2021.
Other than, of course, the moment we’re born.
We all had to seriously lower our expectations exiting the womb. After spending nine months floating weightless in a warm liquid bath, never feeling hungry, surrounded by a faint pink glow, listening to the gentle beating of our mother’s heart…
…and suddenly pushed out into room full of blazing fluorescent lights, the air smelling of disinfectant… passed around like a trophy fish, by giant creatures wearing masks and latex gloves… and then watching them cut the lifeline that had tethered us to our mother all those warm, wonderful months…
Surely, this was not quite what we expected.
And if you happened to be a male, and your parents believed in circumcision, the worst was yet to come.
From a certain perspective, it’s no doubt helpful to have your expectations dashed on the rocks by your very first experience outside the womb. It sort of prepares you for whatever comes next.
But I will admit, I was totally unprepared for 2020. Obviously my expectations were way too high.
And the key to happiness, it turns out, is low expectations.
In 2006, a group of epidemiologists from the University of Southern Denmark set out to explore why citizens of Denmark consistently score higher than any other Western country on measures of life satisfaction. Their findings, published in the prominent medical journal BMJ, zeroed in on the importance of expectations.
In surveys over three decades, about two thirds of Danes consistently reported being “very satisfied” with their lives. No other European population exceeded 50% “very satisfied”, and for most of the EU countries surveyed, the proportion was less than a third.
“If expectations are unrealistically high they could be the basis of disappointment and low life satisfaction,” wrote the authors. “While the Danes are very satisfied, their expectations [compared to other countries] are rather low.”
One reviewer of the BMJ study suggested that high percentage of “very satisfied” Danes might be related to the generous level of alcohol consumption in Denmark, meaning that people were drunk when they responded to the survey.
But I’m going to stick with the theory that people are more contented when they expect the worst. (And no, I wasn’t drinking when I wrote this, although I will, no doubt, polish off a couple of beers when I finish.)
Since we’re on the topic of alcohol, and satisfaction, I did look up global alcohol consumption data on OurWorldInData.org and learned that the Danes consume, on average, the equivalent of about 10 liters of alcohol annually. The global average is closer to 6 liters.
Americans — who regularly appear in these kinds of ‘happiness’ surveys as some of the least happy people in the world — consumed about the same annual volume as the Danes, according to that same website. So we can see, you can’t expect to drink yourself into being “very satisfied.”
As I said, I started 2020 with high expectations. For one thing, the stock market was doing great. (Not that I personally own any stocks, but it just sounds cheery to say, ‘The stock market was doing great’.)
You could say, in fact, that America was doing great, even though the guy who made it great had just lost the election.
The end of 2021: the stock market is still doing great, even though everything else seems to be slowly falling apart.
That’s my new level of expectations. That everything is going to fall apart.
If it really does, then I’ll be happy that my expectations were accurate.
And if it doesn’t, well… how cool is that? Let’s have a drink!