In our society after most people are doing a favor for someone else after they are giving somebody a hand of help, they are often expecting that other person to return their favor, to reward them back in some way. It is normal to want to get rewarded for your work, and it’s also normal to reward others for their help if you can afford it, but the problems arise when one of the parties has expectations from the other one.

More than that, some people are doing stuff for others only to gain some kind of respect and a possible favor return in the future not because they really want to help that person. I’m not going to vilify them, I understand where they are coming from, doing stuff for free it’s an excellent way to gain influence but those people should still have no expectations. Just to note, doing something for the whole purpose of getting something back isn’t called doing good deeds but manipulation, which isn’t necessarily bad. There’s no good and evil. Back to the point, you should do something fully knowing that you might get nothing back, no rewards and no favors, without any expectations, that is a healthy mentality anybody should have.

_{Photo by David Cruz on Unsplash}

You’re creating expectations unconsciously, and it’s completely normal, but the real problem is that if those expectations are not fulfilled by others, you will feel bad, you will get affected by it to some extent, and that is not a healthy situation to be in. Nowadays too many people are getting affected by any stupid shit, just look at the social justice warriors that are getting offended and triggered by words, by somebody disagreeing with them. The point I’m trying to make is that you should live a life where you barely get affected by the things happening outside yourself. I’m not saying to be inhuman, just that you shouldn’t get affected negatively or even positively by somebody saying something about yourself, or dumb stuff like that.

_{PPhoto by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash}

I got into a deep rabbit hole here but what I mean is that if you have expectations and they are unfulfilled your state will most certainly get affected, and you will not be the one in control anymore. It’s your life, you get to be in the control of your mood; otherwise, you’re at the feet of the world, and you might just as well bend over without any resistance because it would be the same thing, you get fucked in the end.

Quit Expecting

Look, the ideal would be to live without any expectations and to do things only because you want to help somebody, not because you want something from them, but we don’t live in an ideal world. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to live without any expectations, it’s just very tough to reach that level and very few did so.

_{Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash}

One thing you could certainly do is to lower your expectations, and if you practice it, over an extended enough period, you will expect fewer and fewer stuff from people. But, regardless of how high your expectations are your true aim should be not to get affected when people are not rising up to that level because they will often not.

The real truth is that nobody’s owning you shit in this life, we, the humans, have no idea what are we doing, we are just playing games calling ourselves civilized only because we have high tech shitty phones when in fact, we are completely lost, but we’re acting like we know everything.

Expectations for Others

Also, one thing you should genuinely try to diminish is setting expectations for other people because if somehow, sometime you can’t raise up to that level, your relationship might get affected. If you are providing the people something from the beginning of your relationship (regardless of its nature), they will eventually get used to that thing and expect you to give it to them. If for whatever reason you can’t provide it anymore sometime in the future they will only freak out, and the things might take a nasty turn.

_{Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash}

To give you an example, one of my friends is dating this chick for over two years now and in that time, they built what it is, in my opinion, a very unhealthy behavior, spending too much time together. When they started dating, he gave her all his attention, for the first three-quarters of their relationship they used to spend almost all of their time together but in the last couple of months, something has changed. Now, because my friend is busy with his studies and just life in general, he can’t give her all of his attention anymore, and she just freaked out completely. As far as I see it, their relationship is completely fucked up at the moment, and one of the reasons is because he made her expect that he will always give her all of his attention and spare time.

Conclusion

Having expectations from people and making other people expect things from you is a tricky thing because we’re all in that situation to some extent but the ideal would be to build that brain muscle that lets you be unaffected by the things outside you. Also, in any kind of relationships with anybody, I think you should just set up some defined limits that the other person can’t cross, you need to have your space.

_{Photo by Fab Lentz on Unsplash}

These are just things I have noticed, mistakes that I saw many people are doing, take or don’t take what I say here as being true but the best thing you could do is to go out there and try everything out for yourself because I might or might not be wrong. But, that of course, if you’re not too busy watching House of fucking Cards and have no more free time to improve yourself and start experiencing the good life.