More on expectations leading to unhappiness: I think the most important instance of this in my life has been the following pattern.
I do a thing where there is some kind of feedback mechanism
The reception is better than I expected, sometimes by a lot
I’m quite happy about this, for a day or so
I immediately and unconsciously update my standards upward to consider the reception the new normal
I do a comparable thing, the reception is worse than the previous time
I brood over this failure for several days, usually with a major loss of productivity
OTOH, I can think of three distinct major cases in three different contexts where this has happened recently, and I think there were probably many smaller ones.
Of course, if something goes worse than expected, I never think “well, this is now the new expected level”, but rather “this was clearly an outlier, and I can probably avoid it in the future”. But outliers can happen in both directions. The counter-argument here is that one would hope to make progress in life, but even under the optimistic assumption that this is happening, it’s still unreasonable to expect things to improve monotonically.
I hope you are trying to understand the causes of the success (including luck) instead of just mindlessly following a reward signal. Not even rats mindlessly obey reward signals.
The expectation of getting worse reception next time can already be damaging.
Like, one day you write a short story, send it to a magazine, and it gets published. Hurray! Next day you turn on your computer thinking about another story, and suddenly you start worrying “what if the second story is less good than the first one? will it be okay to offer it to the magazine? if no, then what is the point of writing it?”. (Then you spend the whole day worrying, and don’t write anything.)
More on expectations leading to unhappiness: I think the most important instance of this in my life has been the following pattern.
I do a thing where there is some kind of feedback mechanism
The reception is better than I expected, sometimes by a lot
I’m quite happy about this, for a day or so
I immediately and unconsciously update my standards upward to consider the reception the new normal
I do a comparable thing, the reception is worse than the previous time
I brood over this failure for several days, usually with a major loss of productivity
OTOH, I can think of three distinct major cases in three different contexts where this has happened recently, and I think there were probably many smaller ones.
Of course, if something goes worse than expected, I never think “well, this is now the new expected level”, but rather “this was clearly an outlier, and I can probably avoid it in the future”. But outliers can happen in both directions. The counter-argument here is that one would hope to make progress in life, but even under the optimistic assumption that this is happening, it’s still unreasonable to expect things to improve monotonically.
I hope you are trying to understand the causes of the success (including luck) instead of just mindlessly following a reward signal. Not even rats mindlessly obey reward signals.
The expectation of getting worse reception next time can already be damaging.
Like, one day you write a short story, send it to a magazine, and it gets published. Hurray! Next day you turn on your computer thinking about another story, and suddenly you start worrying “what if the second story is less good than the first one? will it be okay to offer it to the magazine? if no, then what is the point of writing it?”. (Then you spend the whole day worrying, and don’t write anything.)