Expectations

Daily Meditation 572 — 9/20/23

We spend a great deal of our lives considering our risk to rewards.

In investing, this is pretty straightforward:

“If stock X goes down to $5, I’ll buy 100 shares. I’ll sell it if it keeps going down to $4. But I stand to double the value if it hits $10.”

That’s called a “5R” risk to reward.
You stand to lose $1 per share if it hits $4, but stand to gain $5 a share.
That’s a great risk/reward opportunity!

We — probably unconsciously — do this for everything.

“If I quit my current job for the new one, I get a little bit worse shifts, but stand to make $2 an hour more with a slightly shorter commute.”

“I ate a donut at work and then a slice of Bobbie’s pizza…I think I probably better not have seconds of dinner…crap.”

“Maybe if I wash the dishes after dinner and give my wife a back rub I can get lucky tonight!”

And so on.

You’ll probably begin more consciously realizing weighing your “risk/reward” in your life, now!

But here’s something more “nefarious” about it:

You take the same attitude into account when dealing with others, making things tit-for-tat.

Ever held a door for someone and they barge through without a “thank you!” and you mumble to yourself “Psh…well you’re welcome, jackass…”

We are all prone to a curse: expectation of something in return.

Even just a “Thank you!”

If you do something for someone and expect something in return, it’s not a relationship…
It’s a transaction.

And some transactions in relationships do exist — my wife loves folding laundry (and is better at it), while I handle clogged drains, the trash, etc. It just works for us.

But we need to be more self-aware around our relationships, working to better ensure we aren’t initiating transactions but are more so just doing things for people with zero expectation of anything in return.

Here’s the rub:

Doing things for others just because will give you the best feeling. Of pride. Of joy.

Not everything should be risk/rewarded out in our lives.

Sometimes the best reward is doing the right thing, with zero expectations.

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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”