The Art of the Expectation

So, we all have them. Expectations. Some of them make sense to other people, but in the final analysis, they probably are mostly fiction dreamed up by ourselves.

We wake up every morning with the expectation (well, at least I do) that today will be a day pretty much like the last one. Why is that? I admit that the old "sun coming up" (which it doesn't) like "clockwork" (which we invented) tends to give us a false sense of normalcy. Just watch what would happen if the sun gave it a miss one morning and skipped a day.

Ok, and the stars. Yeah, those are fixed in place, and none of the close ones seem to be approaching super nova--and if they did, it would be old news, as most of them are pretty far away. Light years, to be exact. So they don't seem to be ready to go poof anytime soon in the distant past.

Maybe this is why we expect our friends, family and people at large to do things a certain way. We get snarky when technology doesn't perform up to our expectations, when our coffee isn't hot enough, when the counter girl isn't friendly enough, when our car blatantly refuses to start. We expect the world to operate the way we want it to, and take it personally when it doesn't.

We expect our government to operate a certain way, and I bet you don't think it's operating the way you expect it to. Trouble is, most of us have a pretty individual expectation of a system made up of a lot of complexity.

I think the bigger something is, the less nimble it can be. It takes a lot longer to turn or stop something when it becomes gargantuan. Since 1910, we've gone from 92 million people to 308 million in 2010 in the United States. That's not counting the people who refused to do their census, and there are a fair number of them.

That's a lot of bodies. It's also a lot of expectations. And we have a pseudo-representative government. How could we expect it to be anything but unwieldy? Think about how complicated things got with the last five person committee you worked with, served on or had to tolerate.

And then throw instantaneous information into the mix. How often is your first knee jerk reaction the right answer? Now multiply that by 308 million people.

Yikes.

Suddenly, I think it's optimistic to expect anything to work well. So it's a gift that my tea is hot this morning, the sun looks like it's coming up despite us, and there aren't any prehistoric supernovas finally arriving on the horizon.

I expect it to be a decent day.