3 Things We Cannot Expect to Get out of Life

What does life simply not give?

Flower — Illustration by me

At a certain point in our existence, we begin to develop expectations on how our life will be. From a very young age, we start thinking about what our future will be like. When we’re children, our expectations generally only extend into the beginnings of adulthood, with us often thinking about what sort of “dream job” we’ll have when we grow up. Of course, this type of thinking is driven by a schooling system that instills in us an insidious desire to dream of working. When we get older, and we have already lived a reasonable portion of our lives (say 15–25 years), we start to look at what we’ve done in life and map out what we think our lives will look like in the next couple of decades. Perhaps not everyone has a clear view of what their life will become, but most people have some vague idea. Even if, for whatever morbid reason, people don’t expect themselves to live for very long, that is still technically an expectation; an expectation that life will end early.

Forward planning is not a bad thing, although many times we can think ahead about things which we shouldn’t really expect to actually experience or achieve. Here is my list of three things that I believe we should not (or cannot) expect to get out of our lives. It is a deeply personal and fraught list, built on my own life…