Should I Lower My Expectations?
How setting high self-expectations causes others to have higher expectations of you.
Link to the original essay
I began setting high expectations for myself when I began lifting weights. Wanting to become the best weightlifter I possibly could be, I read up on the science of fitness and became successful in my efforts.
Such expectations began to spread out in my life. What I often tell others is this: “if I am to do something, I am going to put 100% of my effort into it.”
Those who know me can surely attest to this fact. I graduated at the top of my class in my undergraduate degree, spend most of my days studying and writing, and in my relationship with my girlfriend, I put in a serious effort to ensure that she is happy and that our relationship is healthy. All of this behavior is something I proudly regard as a virtue. My life has exponentially improved ever since I have set these sorts of expectations for myself. My finances are in order, I am in graduate school full-time, my relationship is beautiful and the work I engage in fulfills me and has a meaning which is independent of myself.
The Message of High Expectations
There are many individuals in the public-light who practice these virtues. Their message is quite clear: raise your expectations and your life will improve. At the bottom, this sanguine advice is generally true. However, it leaves out something. Something of psychological significance.
When you begin to set high expectations for yourself and you enact such expectations, others will inevitably begin to notice this. Over time, your actions might become so pronounced, that the aforementioned noticing which others engage in becomes an idealizing of you. Which is to say, now they are setting high expectations for you.
The High Expectations of Others
For the most part, noticing this will be quite subtle. You will receive praise — sometimes to the point of morbid uncomfortability. However, the ideal which others impose upon you — which I’d like to say they have no right to do (as the imposition of an ideal on someone else is an indication that they truly do not know you) — becomes most apparent when you make a mistake.
It becomes assumed through the idealization of you that it is impossible for you to make mistakes; obviously, this is absurd. Nonetheless, when you make a mistake and someone who has idealized you notices, the consequences could be dire. Over-reaction is inevitable.
All the while, you know the truth: you are not perfect, and the high-expectations which you have set for yourself come from a place of reason and self-knowledge. You know what you are capable of and what you have reason to believe you’ll fall short on.
Again, those who idealize simply have no clue about such facts. In turn, they only see great behavior and assume that is all there is to you. The reality, however, is that high-expectations always co-exist with profound flaws. Part of such expectations ought to be working to improve on those flaws, but those flaws are there nonetheless.
In some sense, many of those who are in your life are now companions of you, but in a strange manner: the dynamic of mentor/pupil or, superior/inferior is implicitly placed upon the companionship. You are implicitly made mentor/superior, through the will of another. And yet, (in Nietzsche’s words):
Deep down, we do not want followers but equals who follow themselves, who regard us as individuals who simply follow ourselves.
Idealization has detrimental consequences
One’s self-knowledge of one’s own flaws in the face of the high-expectations and idealizations of others is a profound source of pressure. More should take note of the fact that those who perform well in life don’t perform well in all facets of life.
All throwing the expectation of perfection towards such people will do is deepen the holes for which their flaws reside. Indeed, external high-expectations inevitably produce a feeling of guilt within those who have high expectations for themselves — they feel as if they’re falling short on their own expectations, as, those with high-expectations do wish to perform well in all facets of life.
We can see this in Carl Jung’s ideas of the anima and animus. Early on in a relationship, we try to give others the best possible representations of ourselves. In doing so, we might even truly set higher expectations for ourselves. We might work harder, dress nicer, and act better. This sets an unrealistic precedent — usually on both sides of the relationship — for which an immense amount of pressure arises.
To some degree, the external imposition of high-expectations on those with internal impositions of high-expectations is an implicit form of punishment on those who perform well in life; when the high-performing individual fails, their relationship with others becomes a sort of creditor/debtor relationship — the high performing individual is made to feel as if they have some sort of debt owed, whereas others can use this feeling to treat them in any way they like.
This sort of relationship needs to be relaxed. At best, we ought to impose neutral expectations upon others. And at worst, we ought to know a lot about someone before setting high or low expectations for them. Doing otherwise is a profound perversity of presumption. Indeed, there is something sickly about it: it is an implicit assumption that your opinion and judgment of others is implicitly superior. Such assumptions are intellectually and morally depraved.
Expecting some sort of Aristotelian magnanimous man is really — to paraphrase Bertrand Russell — to create a person who one shudders when thinking about how vain such a person would be.
Hence, there is a moral imperative on those who see high-performing individuals, to not impose ideals onto them. For what is more immoral than to create vanity within another as a punishment for their virtues?
