How to Expect Nothing

I’ve been brainwashed to only expect and pursue the best.

Meditation and regular Tai Chi practice are obviously the keys to happiness.

Between a lifetime of competitive sports, Disney movies, and social media, one thing is clear:

It’s the best or nothing.

The first piece of life advice I remember receiving from an adult was to be “always happy, but never satisfied.”

Showing any other emotions besides drive and happiness is useless to your advancement in society.

If you don’t stop striving, you start dying.

In some ways, that is true:

In order to succeed in school, sports, business, or your career, you need a bit of a cutthroat mentality.

I’ve been an athlete for my whole life and a fairly competitive one since I was 14. In most situations, I’ve trained myself to see solutions as binary.

Does “possible solution x” solve “problem y”? Yes or no?

It’s a simple, quick, and easy approach to getting through problems.

But life is not simple, quick, and easy. Especially not so when you’re striving to create a life that you invented in your head based on Rocky movies, pursuing world titles, and using social media daily for nearly a decade.

“I wanted kicks — the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned…