How to design a good life

high expectations and bad weddings

Over the past few months, I read at least a dozen essays about ‘lifestyle design’. The topic has naturally grown on me and I wanted to do my own take. While ‘lifestyle design’ could be a 300-page book, I wanted to discuss one overlooked aspect of it, which is: managing expectations.

I found that most people I meet generally have very high expectations of their careers, partners, and friends. They hold onto a distorted narrative of what their life should look like, and thus become blind to what their life actually looks like.

Sometimes I think it's tragic how many people keep chasing an ambition they won't ever align with. Because in doing so, they deprive themselves of the chance to find what could be suitable for the way they currently live.

Back in the day, people's exposure to outlier successes and experiences of other people was minimal. For example, in the early 2000s, my parents were in their 30s and there was just no way to compare their lives with people in their 30s from other parts of the world. Chances of having crazy ambitions that kept them awake at night were almost zero.

Generally speaking, the odds of an exceptional story—a successful business, or a perfect wedding—occurring to someone from your local town at any given moment is low. When you expand your attention nationally, the odds increase. When you expand globally, your feed becomes an endless stream of highlights and extraordinary achievements, making it seem like everyone is living an exceptional life.

Today most people live as captives of their own dreams and ambitions, which are influenced by this global attention stream that never stops. This creates crazy expectations about what a normal day in your life should look like. We're no longer comparing ourselves to our neighbors or local community, but to the world's top 0.01% achievers.

It's sad how our expectations of ourselves became highly relative to stories from all around the world. Everyone does it, subconsciously or not. It's the path of least resistance to determining what we should be, do, or have.

“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” – Montesquieu

But it feels good to know there's something to do about it: you'd be staggered to know how expectations can alter how you interpret your current circumstances.

We often spend so much time trying to change our circumstances—income, skills, etc.—and so little time managing our expectations. This feels backward considering the latter is more within our control. And more importantly, it leads to the same results from a 'happiness' standpoint.

In his book "Same as Ever," author Morgan Housel writes, "Imagine a life where almost everything gets better but you never appreciate it because your expectations rise as fast as your circumstances. It's terrifying, and almost as bad as a world where nothing gets better."

Housel continues, "My friend Brent has a related theory about marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return. If you both do that, you're both pleasantly surprised."

When asked, "You seem extremely happy and content. What's your secret to living a happy life?" 98-year-old Charlie Munger replied: "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you're going to be miserable your whole life."

Reflecting on the last 4, 6, or even 8 years of my life, I found I consistently achieved less than what I set out to do. I also think there are lots of people like me. If this is true, what do you think should change? If there's always this disparity between expectations and reality, isn't managing expectations a more tangible change to make than setting more goals?

Some things are certain; they never change, like how a day is only 24 hours, how our attention is limited, and how there's so much to take at a time. If anything, this sheds light on the importance of identifying what we should exclude from our expectations of ourselves rather than what to include.

Dreams are dangerous; they often serve as platters for big expectations that we have of ourselves and of people. They also have no limits; they sometimes signal extremes. So it's natural most of them never happen, yet we don't stop dreaming.

I like to think that the answer is not to stop dreaming, but rather to dream modestly. If you dream modestly, i.e., manage your expectations, it's easier to lead a fulfilled life because you would be disappointed with yourself less often.

Note that this doesn't interfere with ambition. In many cases, lower expectations are even a better vehicle for ambition, because the gap between where you are and where you want to be is smaller, making goals more achievable, and in less time.

I generally consider the word 'goals' absurd—very absurd. But if that's your thing, if you want to dream big and achieve big goals and conquer the new year and all that nice stuff, the real answer is to aim for the exact opposite of 'big'.

A golden rule I learned is: The more you accept yourself and your flaws, the more you align with what is like you. The more you align with what is like you, the greater the sense of fulfillment you're going to have in your life.

If dreams are not often adjusted due to inputs and events that happen in our lives, they remain trapped in what we think should be ideal but almost never happens. Only when you allow for your dreams to shape up, i.e., evolve and adapt based on recent inputs, learning, and life experiences, do you move toward better things and ultimately, a better life.

For what it's worth, perfect careers and friends and partners and cool cars do not follow any predetermined scripts. They don't happen by being fixated on some specific things to do.

By scripting, we underestimate the role of serendipity. This is very clear, but we often dismiss it. Think of how many times things have fallen exactly in place with little to no effort on your part. And although too many good things have already happened to you and me that were outside of our initial 'scripts', we don't seem to stop scripting.

For example, of all weddings I attended during the past few years, the ones that seemed to be following a script were the most miserable. It wasn't just that the overall energy was bad—you could almost see it on the faces of the couple getting married; they already made their day so dull and sucked so much fun out of it the moment they put a script on it. Contrast this with weddings that are not scripted; they turn out even more fun than what the couple could've anticipated.

To me, it seems that all these bad weddings are just victims of big expectations. Those are expectations that are mostly influenced by other weddings. And this would be less of a problem if those other weddings were themselves fun, which in many cases they are not.

I think it's just the same thing with life: wonderful things seem to happen when we let go of high expectations and fixed dreams. We cannot stop dreaming, but we can change and adapt our dreams. We can be more in harmony with what feels natural to us when we allow for life to unfold organically.

In that sense, a good wedding is just a natural display of presence: happy guests being themselves, enjoying the moment to the best they can. A good time is just some low-expectation, low-effort moments stacked together. And a good life is just a good flow of moments and places and people that all come naturally without any script and without much contemplating.

Thanks for reading,

Zeyad Mahran