I was inspired by this exceprt from Visa to write this post:

Aside: I had a breakthrough recently as a musician, which helped me bust a rut I’d been in for about a decade. I Expected to become a better musician and my Expectation kept me from becoming a better musician. I suddenly started becoming better when I Accepted failure & LISTENED.

it’s really the same goddamn story every time, lol. I excel in domains where I’m playful and I have no expectations. I allow the world to surprise me and I delight in the surprises. I write my threads one tweet at a time, shot from the hip, no expectations. And joy comes

I want to talk about expectations. Not because I have some grand miracle cure but I think meditation and insights about phenomenology can give us a glimpse into why expectations can really suck and hurt us.

First I think it’s important to throw out some definitions that will be important. I want to preface this by saying these definitions are my own and informed by my own investigations. But, I’m sure if you investigate yourself you will come to similar conclusions (or maybe not).

Thing: a defined “ball” of sensory experience we place boundaries around and reify as being “real.”

(by “ball” I mean a set of sensory phenomena such as bodily sensations and thoughts that we perceive as one continuous thing)

Expectation: a Thing that we hope to happen based on causes and conditions. We believe this Thing will bring us some type of satisfaction.

Experience: all experience from first principles comes from the six sense gates. Experience is the six senses. Nothing more.

So really, an expectation is a set of sensory experiences that will come after causes and conditions that we hope will bring us lasting satisfaction.

I’m willing to posit that when we set expectations on things, it is because we believe those things are lacking from our experience. When you expect an interview to go well, you might think you lack safety from a stable source of income. When you expect yourself to socialize well at a party, you might believe you lack some sort of thing that everyone else has. When you place an expectation on another person, you are saying that you think that person lacks the thing you expect.

“I expect myself to be charismatic during this date” really just means you believe you lack whatever is at the root of the desire of being charismatic (approval, safety, love, etc).

“I expect myself to perform well while playing this sport” just means you believe you lack whatever is at the root of performing well (self-confidence, other’s approval, etc).

This perceived since of lack is empty, dependent on many conditions. The lack is an illusion, a lens you set on experience in which you start getting confirmation bias from. Luckily, because this perceived lack is empty, we can begin to see that the lack can be used to see something beautiful: what you think you lack is already there.

Don’t worry, it’s not that “you have everything in you already” in a woo manifesting type of way and all you need to do is think about the thing you want and you’ll get it, but it’s that you literally have what you think you lack already. Just look at sensations! At phenomena! All experience, no matter what, is through the 6 senses. That’s all it is, just arising and passing phenomena that are no different from each other. That’s what I mean when I say what you believe you lack is already inside of you: the same type phenomena is already there waiting for you to pay attention to it. Just look! Like, if you have an expectation of doing something well, that phenomena that will come after the perceived sense of doing it well is ALREADY HERE in experience.

If you just look at the phenomena and sensations that come after an expectation is met, you’ll see they are no different than the phenomena that are there when the expectation is not met. Perhaps the vedanā may be different (unpleasant vs pleasant), but the sensations themselves are pretty much the same. And you might be thinking “oh but if only I did well on this thing, X or Y would’ve happened and I would be so happy right now!”, that’s fake! That’s just a thought that arises and passes away. Look, that thought is gone, and the next one comes, and that one is gone too. What you think you lack is an illusion fueled by ignorance.

Unfortunately communicating this to a non-meditator is kind of hard because without it, Things are reified all the time. Things feel very REAL. This is THAT or that thing is X or Y. It’s very hard to realize emptiness without direct insight and doing the work yourself. These things have to be practiced over and over to actually make a difference. It takes lots of practice for your system to actually update its priors. It has to hit a new equilibrium that finally tips over into a territory of clarity. Unfortunately this is quite mundane and boring unless you are committed and find phenomenology naturally interesting.

Mechanisms

Ironically, by setting expectations, we typically get results we don’t want to see. We set expectations on ourselves to do well socially but instead we stutter and produce awkward silence. We expect the presentation to go well but instead we forget our lines.

I’m not going to pretend my answer is correct but I’ll present a theory as to why I think this is: I believe we are always in a state of confirmation bias based on our way of looking or “lens.” Rob Burbea defines a “way of looking” (or a lens) fundamentally as the total mix of assumptions, conceptions, reactions, and inclinations—both gross and subtle, conscious and unconscious—that are operating in the mind at any given time. A way of looking does not require active or deliberate thinking. It is often an intuitive, immediate stance we take toward experience (self 2 informing self 1 (inner game of tennis reference)).

So, an expectation is a way of looking (or lens) at our sensory experience. Let’s continue.

Ways of looking are fundamentally how we generate our conscious experience of reality. A way of looking does not require active or deliberate thinking. For example, Burbea says that feeling a bodily sensation as “mine,” even if you aren’t consciously thinking the word “mine,” is itself a specific view or way of looking at that sensation.

So, an expectation is a generator function of our experience rather than simply a thing we want.

Finally, what we are actually doing when setting expectations is taking that Thing we think we lack and actively constructing our experience to confirm to ourself we lack this Thing. What I mean is, if we think we lack Thing X, we will set an expectation on causes and conditions to try and get Thing X, but instead we end up actively constructing our reality to match our lens of lacking Thing X.

All of the “failures” that happen because of expectations are a result of contraction.

Simply trying to confirm to ourselves we already have thing x so we don’t need expectations is a naive solution. When you focus (or take the lens of) on lacking Thing X, the mind is in a state of craving/aversion. This is a state of contraction. The mind gets sucked in to the object of its desire or fear which shrinks the mental space and tightening the body. I’m sure most people have experienced this. They set an expectation on themselves and when they are doing the thing, their mind feels heavier and more “clamped down.” It is this very tightness and loss of spaciousness that paralyzes our natural flow (self 2), causing the “failure” rather than meeting expectations.

So in summary, setting expectations ironically makes us fail to get the Thing we think we lack because we adopt a lens of perception that confirmation biases our system into looking for the thing we lack. This ultimately leads to contraction which leads to a blockage of flow and abundance we would normally have as a way of looking. This way of looking WOULD actively construct an experience in which we have the Thing, but we are too caught up in lack. Remember, all of this is being applied to the six sense gates, nothing more, nothing special.

What is to be Done

I want to offer some helpful practices that may counteract the harm of expectations. It’s important to keep in mind when we’re dealing with change to our phenomenology, it takes a lot of practice to move to a new baseline and equilibrium. If you really want change, your old priors have to be updated which can take a lot of effort. I mean, think about it. Your baseline models of reality are being reinforced everyday, every minute. Who said this was gonna be easy?

It’s also important to keep in mind expectations still play an important role for ourselves: they help us find what we are lacking. We can genuinely lack a stable sense of safety due to not having a source of income so we set an expectation on ourselves to perform well in an interview. In theory this expectation is supposed to help us find safety, but seldom does it do anything for us.

  1. Learn to recognize and identify when you are setting expectations.
    • This is more of a meta-tip but it is an essential skill here. When you are aware of a hot pan, you would immediately let go because it hurts. Similarly, if you can become aware of expectations, they will naturally feel like they hurt and OVER TIME(!) you will start to let go of them more and more. It might also help to explicitly objectify the expectation by labelling it like "this is the mind thinking it is lacking safety."
  2. Objectify and de-objectify expectations.
    • To objectify an expectation means to stop living from inside it and start seeing it as something happening in experience. Objectifying an expectation means breaking it into observable parts. You can do this by explicitly labelling an expectation and its parts like "thoughts of lack" or "sensations of anxiety."
    • To de-objectify an expectation means to stop treating it like one solid, real thing and start seeing that it is actually a shifting process made of thoughts, images, sensations, and urges. Like I said in the beginning, an expectation is just a "ball" of sensory experiences that will come after causes and conditions, and this "ball" can be seen through as impermeant and not "real." It only feels like a solid object because the mind bundles a lot of moving parts together and calls it one noun. You are seeing that the expectation has no single core. It is not a thing. It is an event, or really a series of events. De-objectifying removes solidity which ultimately reveals the illusory nature of our way of looking at things.
  3. Shift your focus from outcome to direct/immediate sensory experience.
    • This will help us move away from the way of looking from lacking Thing X and move into a more continuous, every-evolving experience of reality. Using direct sensory experience as your anchor can help you pull your attention to the raw mechanics of action itself, letting your intuition do its thing. If playing a sport, focus on the sensations of your body moving around, if your writing an essay, focus on the sensations of thoughts themselves to mitigate the active construction of expectations. Expectations pull attention into a fantasy of the future which hinders our ability to do the thing.
  4. Adopt a stance of play/wonder.
    • As they are, expectations depend on priors. Intentionally adopting a lens of play disrupts these priors and let's us construct an experience that is more aligned with our self 2 rather than our rigid self 1. One might say: but I need X event to go a certain way to get Thing Y! Well, ultimately this is just a thought on closer inspection, which is illusory. Inspect your thoughts more and you will see they do not represent "reality". Seriously, the next time you have a thought about event X to get Thing Y, ask yourself how the thoughts you are having might be not True.
  5. Practice noticing you will never be satisfied when meeting expectations.
    • The next time you set an expectation, and you actually "get" Thing X, closely inspect what that actually means. What actually is Thing X? Where is Thing X ACTUALLY at in direct experience? Is Thing X permanent or impermeant? How are you feeling 10 minutes after you thing you got Thing X? All Thing X is is a ball of sensory experience we think is permanent in some way. This cannot satisfy you.
  6. "Dissolve" the lacking subject.
    • Expectations depend on a subject who believes they lack Thing X. By dissolving this sense of subject (self), no longer are we burdened by the distinct borders we drawer between subject and Thing X. There is no longer a distance between Thing X to get and the subject in direct sensory experience.
  7. Embody the states of others.
    • Deity yoga is a core Vajrayana practice in which you dissolve your sense of self and fully identify with an enlightened being, embodying their qualities rather than reaching for them from the outside. Cate Hall lays out a similar practice in her Substack post, "How to instantly be better at things": It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away. Instead of affirming the lack using sloppy self-affirmations ("I am good at X. I will get Thing X."), you embody another being you have in mind from a state of abundance. By embodying the target agent, the mind skips the craving/aversion stage which avoids the tightness and loss of flow that causes failure. Keep in mind this is a practice and does take time to become "good" at.


To wrap this up, expectations trap people because they stem from an illusion of lack, functioning as a rigid lens that creates contraction, blocks natural flow, and ultimately causes the very failures feared. Setting an expectation actively constructs reality to confirm this perceived lack, keeping the mind stuck in a continuous state of craving or aversion. Breaking free form this failure-mode requires lots practice to move into a new state of equilibrium. Adopting a stance of playful curiosity and recognizing that achieving an outcome never brings permanent satisfaction, bypasses the rules of expectations altogether. This approach allows actions to unfold naturally (self 2) without the burden of top-down priors.