The Fallout of Great Expectations

The Atlantic article that ran in June, “We’re learning the wrong lessons from the World’s Happiest Countries” begins:

“Since 2012, most of the humans on Earth have been given a nearly annual reminder that there are entire nations of people who are measurably happier than they are. This uplifting yearly notification is known as the World Happiness Report.”

Northern European countries have swept the top performing countries for happiness since the inception of the report. The writer of the article points out that the word “Happiness” in the report title is a bit misleading—that the report is really more a metric of contentment. This may feel like splitting hairs, but the point is this is not a report on exuberance or lives filled with more exclamation points—this is a report about people’s perception of of how well life is going for them.

Predictably, the happier countries have a more comfortable standard of living, with the highest ranking countries also having services like “universal health care, ample paid vacation time, and affordable child care.” Intuitively if you are stressed about meeting your basic needs--which is true in countries that have been impoverished by our global inequities and is true for the large segments of rich countries where there are massive divides between the haves and have-nots--happiness is harder to come by.

But there is another element to happiness (or contentment) identified in this report that goes beyond stable and reliable capacity to meet basic needs: expectations.

The article quotes Jukka Savolainen, a Finnish American sociology professor who adds insight into why Finland continues to rank so highly on this annual Happiness Report. He introduces the concept of :

“LAGOM, a Swedish and Norwegian word meaning ‘just the right amount… The Nordic countries are united in their embrace of curbed aspirations for the best possible life.”

Once you get beyond meeting basic needs, the recipe for happiness, it seems, is expecting less. This isn’t a terribly wild idea, but it does go against the mythos and ethos of the United States, where the credo of the day is best captured in the old Burger King jingle “Have it Your Way! Have it Your Way!”

The US clearly fits the mold of a wealthy country where there are vast inequities. There are many people in this country whose basic needs are not even close to being met. But there are also swaths of wealthy people in this country who have every basic need more than met who are not terribly happy or content. And for that segment of the population, the expectation cure is relevant.

As a person who has lived a life with a lot of privilege, who grew up basting in the “Have it Your Way” mythos of the United States, I’ve needed a lot of re-training around expectations. And, as luck would have it, life usually does a good job of delivering those lessons.

While I consider myself to be a reasonably competent person, I also know that I’m a slow learner in certain realms. I have to touch the proverbial hot stove several dozen times before important psychological lessons really sink in. And the lesson of the gift of curbed expectations has absolutely been a slow awakening for me, and one which I can easily lose sight of for a time and have to find my way back to.

As is so often the case for me, when I land on anything that feels wise and true, it seems its origins can be found in Buddhist philosophy. In this instance, the Buddhist concept of non-attachment is relevant. Buddhist correctly point out that suffering is an inevitable part of life (all lives, might I add…even the privileged ones), and it identifies one of the etiologies of this suffering as being attachment to outcomes over which you ultimately don’t have control. In essence: the trap of wishing for things to be different than they are. The weather is a classic example of this…the fervent wish of my February self to be able to wear flip flops and a tee shirt, and the fervent wish of my August self for a break from unrelenting sunshine and heat. Wishes that are outside of my control, capricious, and ultimately damage contentment because they are unreachable.

In the year of the pandemic our wishes shifted. The things that pre-pandemic felt like givens became precious and rare—things to be pined for. In early summer many of those things became available again, and with that shift, our (or at least my) wishes shifted. This past June I spent a week with family for the first time in a long time. The gathering would have been unthinkable in June of 2020. It was a wonderful week. But the weather… terrible. Rainy and cold, not at all what we wished for a beach trip. And so while the lessons of the pandemic hadn’t completely faded and the thrill of being able to see loved ones again was real, the expectations for “how it should be” were creeping up again. The happiness bench mark forever receding into the distance.

As the Delta variant and breakthrough cases have become more prevalent and daunting in this country in recent weeks there is a kind of wishing whiplash. What was possible in June, feels less possible now, but the wishbone is sometimes delayed in titrating to reality.

And so in the whiplash, I find myself paradoxically wishing for lagom. Wishing I wished for less. Wishing to have a touch more of the Nordic philosophy at my fingertips, instead of having to dig for it.

Between the pandemic and climate change the “givens” of my childhood are simply, no longer givens. What we can expect from the world, from other humans, from life—feels fairly hazy. I imagine we will all continue to make plans, but probably will experience far more of plans falling through than used to happen from fast shifting circumstance—fire spreading, hurricanes barreling down, variants ticking up.

And if we can learn to expect less, perhaps we can get a little closer to contentment anyways.