Low Expectations

No, this is not an ill fated attempt at a parody on Charles Dickens' classic "Great Expectations". It's just a phrase that has been twirling in my head in the past few days. Yes, twirling. I can practically see it dancing its way into the deepest recesses of my brain. I can't decide between keeping the tone of this post light bordering on ridiculous or just go all out with some cynicism and depress the hell out of ya folks. 

Let's start with what acted as the final impetus for this rant. I read yet another of those "Date a girl who does thingumajiggyblahblah" articles. Now, this is a trend that had started off considerably well. "Date a girl who reads", "Date a girl who writes", "Date a girl who travels" etc and very quickly descended in a downward spiral to "Date a girl who loves biryani", "Date a girl who shaves her legs" blah blah. You get the drift. Not only do all these articles weirdly fetishize one aspect of a person's character, they are more often than not patently ridiculous. She should dream all the time, she should live like every day is her last day, everything in life should be an adventure, she should be happy all the time, she should love puppies and babies and flowers, she should be your passport to adulthood by being a kind, nurturing, forgiving, source of endless support signifying everything that either doesn't exist or if it does casts extremely unforgiving standards on women. Grow up. Your girlfriend (or boyfriend, for there are counterparts to these articles fetishizing men) are going to be real life people with real life worries and anxieties and obligations and cannot possibly live up to the exacting standards that these articles harp on. I can't bring myself to believe that people actually consider this nonsense seriously but then there is no other explanation to the regularity with which such articles turn up in the internet.

Of course, if I were a scholar, I would argue that this trend ties in with a very well researched and oft perceived fault with my generation which brings me to the second part of my post. A lot has been written on the perpetual state of unhappiness that plagues us millennials (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in) for there is always something or the other that's wrong or doesn't meet our exacting standards. I can vouch for this personally, being one myself as as from my keen observation of my friends and acquaintances. If one thing is going our way, there are many others which just submit to our desires. For, you see, our desires are many. We have been taught since our early days here that we can have it all- Money (with a capital M), Friends, Family, Love, Leisure, Passion, Conviction, Career-and hold each of these dear to our hearts while compromising on nothing. We are special, you see, more educated, with more opportunities, longer life spans, more discerning tastes- we are the embodiment of perfection itself. So it's only natural when this glasshouse of impossible ambitions comes tumbling down when we actually try doing these things all at once and realise that, after all, we can't have it all. 

Low expectations. These two words spin a rather negative woeful tale, don't they? We are always taught to aim high, to expect lots for how are we to achieve great heights when confined within narrow circumferences. But what about knowing ones limits, learning how to be happy with our present state of being, not mourning the loss of possible future accomplishments while sitting on a veritable stockpile of past and present ones? Low expectations doesn't necessarily mean complacency, a lack of desire to succeed or for that matter a lack of ability to do so. Maybe it just is an acknowledgment of how one can't have it all at one point in time, of how if one desires to accomplish something in particular, than another thing, another desire must give way to it. Maybe, it is the key to a life where lack of constant achievement doesn't equal failure, where it is not all or none, where one knows how to be happy by just being. Maybe, just maybe.