How to Handle Expectations Like a Stoic

Reading Time: 12 Minutes

In February 1945, Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp somewhere in Eastern Europe. One day, a fellow prisoner told Frankl that he had a strange dream. He said a voice granted him one chance to ask a question and it could be anything he wanted to know. He asked the voice when the war would be over, marking their liberation.

“What did your dream voice answer?” Frankl asked him.

“March thirtieth,” he whispered.

This conversation took place in early March of that year. Frankl’s friend was ecstatic about the liberation that his dream promised, since its fulfillment was only weeks away.

 As the sworn date drew nearer, news of the war’s progress reached the camp and it was very unlikely that freedom would be guaranteed on that date. On March 29^th, the prisoner suddenly became ill and drew a fever. On March 30^th, the dream’s promised day of the war ending, he became hysterical and lost consciousness. By March 31^st, he was dead.

In the same camp earlier that year, as Frankl shared in his influential book, the chief doctor noticed something similar. The death rate between Christmas and New Year’s 1945 was the highest he’d ever seen. In his opinion, it wasn’t because of harder working conditions, harsher weather, less food, or more viral outbreaks. These people simply had high hopes that they would be home again by Christmas. Hope dissipated as the days drew near with no encouraging news, and so did their courage and will to live.

God willing, we will never go through something as unspeakable as the Holocaust. But this pattern that Frankl and the medical doctor noticed bears truth to something that can be scaled down to our own lives – managing expectations.

The Problems with Expectations

If someone you knew took traffic signals personally, you’d think they were foolish. But we’re no better when we impose our expectations on life, and they don’t go our way. Making matters worse, we internalize this with mental and verbal outcries.

So-and-so conspired against me!

Why is this happening to me?

Can’t I just catch a break for once?

I knew it all along…

This changes nothing, and the frame of thought that makes these complaints can be a liability if we’re not careful.

About two millennia before Frankl’s experience in the Nazi death camps, the ancient Stoics understood the problems with wanting things to go our way. To them, life was a continuous negotiation between reality and what we want. The only problem, they pointed out, was that we assume we have more of a say in the outcome of events than we actually do.

Fate or Fortune, as the Stoics would say, deals the cards of life, and she doesn’t always play fair. Perhaps you’d say that most of what she deals isn’t fair. At face value, we know this but struggle to accept it. We resist external factors that rule over reality. Many times we’re not even aware of how tightly we grip our certitude.

We continue to believe that something was deliberately planned against us. In some form, we think we’re at the center of the universe and its sole mission is to suppress our efforts. So we resist, and we learn the hard way.

This is our default attribute, if left unchecked. Humans are survival-oriented beings. We value predictability so much that it creates a monstrous fear of the unknown within our psyche. We always want to know and be certain. So much that we do things and develop beliefs that cripple us.

We hold grudges against people.

We constantly complain.

We worry about the future.

We become entitled.

It’s toxic. Not to mention that higher expectations do not assure higher levels of happiness, performance, or quality of life. On the contrary, as John Wooden pointed out, most of society’s unhappiness results from high expectations not being met, or wanting too much.

You may presume that the Stoics, as a remedy to all of this, gave up on having expectations and adopted nihilism.

Not at all. Instead, they suggested that we focus our efforts on other matters.

The Stoic Archer and Control

There’s an interesting analogy from the Stoics about how everything that happens to us is akin to an archer shooting an arrow. The archer can do lots of things with his bow to the best of his ability. He can build it, tighten the drawstring, pull the arrow back, aim it, and shoot. Once the arrow is launched, he can only wait and see if he hits the target. But other things can happen.

An unexpected gust of wind can throw it off, or the target can move. Setting the arrow in motion to hit the target was all in the archer’s control, but whether he hits or misses is ultimately down to fate or external variables beyond his control. So it goes with our own shots at life.

This is what’s known as the “Stoic Fork”. The first line in Epictetus’s Enchiridion captures its essence: “Some things are within our power, while others are not”. It’s the filter we must run our minds through.

For the Stoics, the things we have control over are our thoughts and actions – where our focus must be. No external force can make you think or do something, nor stop you from doing it. To everything else, we must say It is nothing to me, because it’s futile to put energy into things we can do nothing about. We have control over so little – financial recessions, the weather, a pandemic, an illness, getting hit by a car, or someone slandering us.

Luckily, the few things we have control over are the most relevant – we can choose what anything means and the action we take.

We can take charge of our finances to weather a storm, practice social distancing, eat healthy, exercise caution, and decide whether something someone says about us is actually true or bad. Heck, at least they don’t know about your other worse parts.

Still, you can do everything right and practical and still not be rewarded. The archer is always our role. But it’s how we go about things that matter, not whether we succeed. When we become so focused on the outcome, the process we must follow to get there becomes blurry or forgotten.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s letter to his wife on the eve of the Allied invasion at Sicily in 1943 succinctly captures his relinquishment of control that we’d benefit to emulate, “Everything we could think of to do has been done; the troops are fit; everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods.”

Praemeditatio Malorum

We live in a culture that strongly advocates positive thinking, which typically involves fixating on the best-case scenario. Any mention of a negative and devastating outcome is heretical, even if it is a likely possibility.

Repression and denial of reality is very common, but it’s not so much a strategy as it is a recipe for failure. Modern psychotherapeutic research shows that avoidance of problems maintains fear and anxiety.

The Roman Stoic Seneca once wrote that “Fortune falls heavy on those for whom she’s unexpected. The ones always on the lookout easily endures”. While we may not be able to confront all probable outcomes of a situation head on, we can always confront them in our mind. After all, the mind is the arena where we battle most of our anguish.

The Stoics practiced Praemeditatio Malorum, or premeditation of evils in Latin. It’s simple. If there’s something that you fear will happen or lose (even a loved one), imagine yourself going through that experience, in all its excruciating details. As if it were happening right now, with rationality and calmness.

Where would you be?

How would you feel?

What would someone tell you?

How would you handle it?

So what if it happens?

Is it as terrible as it seems?

To imagine worst-case scenarios like your spouse leaving you, being in an accident, losing your job, or paying an enormous debt has an effect that’s contrary to what you might expect. It is to your mind like experiencing the actual thing, and it adapts to virtually anything you experience over and over. You become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

For Stoic premeditation to work well, the psychotherapist Donald Robertson recommends five minutes per day for typical “misfortunes” and 15-30 minutes per day for more distressing events. This takes patience and you may grow bored, but that’s the sign of progress. Over time, the troubling thought will lose its dominance over your mind.

This also isn’t an exercise only for the most catastrophic events. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, starts Book Two with a morning pep talk to himself to prepare for the toils of dealing with the jerks of everyday life. Like him, you can start the day knowing that you can still be surprised, but not shaken.

When All Else Fails

After you’ve meditated on possible setbacks and distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that are not, there only remains one option: acceptance.

In another thought-provoking analogy, the Stoics see people as a dog tied to a cart. The cart is always moving, and we can’t control it, but we can control how much we resist it. We can get dragged along the way, or trot alongside it. Whatever we do, the cart’s not stopping and the rope’s not breaking.

Frankl said of suffering, “Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross.” Acceptance doesn’t just mean to adapt, but to accept the impermanence and obscurity of the world. Having rigid expectations is to go against this – to reject the fabric of life. In acceptance, we’re also forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it. This perspective evinces a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

But let’s be clear, this is not the same thing as giving up. As Ryan Holiday notes to this objection, “This has nothing to do with action – this is for the things that are immune to action.” The Stoics reminded us to get out and do things, and get involved. We just need to accept where the line is drawn between the small zone of what we can influence and the large dominion of fate that we cannot.

Confront Your Expectations

The Stoic message on expectations is clear: we need to lower them, or at least align them with reality and prepare for everything to fall apart. Most of all, we have to take some time to question why we are following these expectations and the implications of not having them come to fruition.

Do you have any you’ve been following diligently your entire life without question?

Maybe society has imposed some (or a lot) on you? Have you been holding onto expectations that have been making you more miserable in pursuit of its realization? Sometimes we give up inner peace or our values to do this.

Is the tradeoff worth it?

What if you just let go of your control?

Most of us don’t ask ourselves these questions because we won’t like the answers or we’re neck-deep in it already, so why quit now?

Maybe the problem isn’t so much philosophical as it is pragmatic. Maybe you’re just doing too much at once. You may take the advice of the Stoics to heart and see that it is in your control to cram your schedule. But will the quality of the results keep up with your breakneck pace?

This isn’t about quitting. It’s about pausing, evaluating, and course-correcting so we don’t continue chasing unrealistic expectations.

Viktor Frankl did just this. It was the difference between him and his dreaming friend. No one could ever expect that what he and thousands of other Jews were about to experience would be one of history’s darkest times. But he did expect one thing – that fate forever tugs the leash around our necks.

He didn’t prepare for an end. He braced for suffering.

Reframing his situation helped him survive three years of hell across four Nazi death camps. It also gave him a pivotal insight about life.

He said, “It did not really matter what we [prisoners] expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly.”