I was sitting in the waiting room of a cardiologist’s office two winters ago—not for anything serious, just a routine follow-up after a minor procedure—and I watched a man across from me unravel completely over a forty-five-minute wait. He checked his watch every few minutes. He asked the receptionist twice how much longer. He called someone to say he’d be late, voice clipped and tight. By the time his name was finally called, he looked like he’d already had a terrible day, and it was barely ten in the morning.
I recognized him. Not the man specifically—I’d never seen him before in my life. But I recognized what he was doing, because I’d done it for decades.
What I understood watching him was something I’d been slowly working out for years: that a huge portion of human misery is self-inflicted, and not in the vague, poster-slogan sense of the phrase. It’s inflicted by aiming your expectations at the wrong targets—demanding predictability from things that were never going to provide it, while letting yourself off the hook for the things that were always genuinely yours to control.
That realization, sitting in that waiting room at 71, wasn’t new to me. But it was clearer than it had ever been. And at 73 now, it’s the closest thing I have to an actual philosophy.
I had it backwards for decades
For most of my adult life, I held high expectations for things I couldn’t control and low expectations for myself. I expected other people to behave consistently, to be fair, to remember what they’d promised and follow through without being reminded. I expected institutions to function the way they claimed to. I expected outcomes to match my effort in some clean and proportional way. And when none of those things happened—which was often—I was angry, or quietly disappointed, or convinced that the world was slightly but persistently arranged against me.
Meanwhile, I let myself slide. I told myself I’d get to the harder things eventually. I negotiated with myself constantly about what I actually owed myself in terms of discipline and follow-through. The expectations I held for my own behavior—my own consistency, my own word—those I kept soft and moveable. There was always a reason why this particular week wasn’t the right time. I was generous with myself in ways I wouldn’t have tolerated from anyone else.
The inversion of that—holding myself to a real standard while releasing my grip on everything I couldn’t actually influence—didn’t arrive all at once. It came slowly, through enough accumulated disappointment to finally notice the pattern. I kept expecting the wrong things to change and wondering why nothing ever felt stable underneath me. The answer had been there the whole time.
Low expectations aren’t the same as giving up
When I describe this to people—that I’ve learned to have low expectations for things outside my control—they sometimes flinch. It sounds like resignation. It sounds like someone who’s made peace with mediocrity by simply wanting less, someone who stopped caring and is calling it wisdom.
That’s not what I mean at all.
Low expectations for things outside your control isn’t pessimism. It’s accuracy. It’s recognizing that other people are going to do what they’re going to do, that systems fail in unpredictable ways, that the traffic and the test results and the economy don’t take their cues from what I need them to do. Building your inner life on the expectation that those things will behave themselves is a form of magical thinking, and every time it doesn’t work—which is most of the time—you pay an emotional tax you didn’t have to pay.
What I found when I genuinely lowered those expectations wasn’t numbness or indifference. It was something closer to relief. When something outside my control goes wrong now, I don’t have to move through the whole cycle of feeling betrayed. It happened. It was always a real possibility. I deal with what’s in front of me and move forward. And when things go right—when the appointment runs on time, when someone comes through in an unexpected way—there’s actual pleasure in it, because I wasn’t counting on it.
That’s not giving up. That’s just refusing to make yourself miserable over things that were never yours to determine in the first place.
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High expectations only work when they’re aimed at the right things
The flip side is where people also get it wrong, just differently. There’s a version of the low-expectations idea that slides into a general lowering of standards—for yourself, for your relationships, for what your life can become. That’s not the lesson. The lesson is directional, not global.
High expectations aimed at what you can actually control are not only sustainable—they’re clarifying. When I hold myself to a real standard about how I spend my time, how I treat the people around me, whether I follow through on what I’ve said I’d do—those expectations produce something. They have traction. There’s a direct relationship between the expectation and the outcome, because I’m the variable.
This is different from aspirations, which can sometimes be another form of wishful thinking. An aspiration without behavioral expectations attached to it is just a mood. What I’m talking about is the internal standard you hold yourself to in the ordinary day-to-day—the small decisions that accumulate into a life. Did I do what I said I would? Did I show up the way I intended to? Did I take the action available to me, or did I wait for circumstances to become more convenient?
At 73, the things within my control are narrower than they were at 40. My health has parameters I didn’t choose. My energy is different. But within those parameters, I still have real choices—and those are the ones I take seriously now.
The line between what’s yours and what isn’t is hard to draw
This is where I’ve tripped up the most. The division sounds clean in theory—your behavior is yours, other people’s behavior is theirs—but in practice, it gets complicated fast, especially in relationships.
When someone I love is struggling, is their situation outside my control? Mostly, yes. But not entirely. I can choose how I show up for them. I can choose whether to offer help or stay out of the way. I can choose not to impose my idea of what they should do while still being genuinely present. The fact that I can’t fix someone else’s life doesn’t mean I’m powerless within it. It means I have to be precise about what my actual role is—and honest about where my involvement stops being helpful.
The trap I fell into for years was using “this is outside my control” as a reason to disengage entirely—to stop investing, to protect myself from disappointment by just not caring too much. That isn’t the same as holding low expectations. That’s avoidance wearing the costume of wisdom, and I’ve worn it plenty.
The version that actually works is more effortful. It requires being honest, case by case, about what you can genuinely influence and what you cannot. It means resisting the pull to either over-control—grasping at outcomes that aren’t yours—or under-invest, treating “it’s not in my control” as an exit ramp from difficult things. The line is real, but drawing it takes ongoing practice, not a one-time decision.
What actually shifted when I started living this way
The most concrete change was how I felt at the end of days that didn’t go the way I’d hoped.
Before I’d really internalized any of this, a bad day could spiral. One thing outside my control would go wrong—a plan would fall apart, something I’d been counting on wouldn’t come through—and I’d carry it forward. I’d treat it as evidence of a trend. It would color the rest of the day and sometimes bleed into the next one.
What’s different now is that the bad thing stays where it belongs. It happened. It was outside my control, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t—if I dropped the ball—I note that, and I try to do better. If it was genuinely outside my control, I let myself feel whatever I feel about it and then I let it settle. I don’t build a story around it about what it means or where things are heading.
I also notice that I get more done now, not less. When I raised my expectations for myself and stopped burning energy on disappointment about things I couldn’t control, something freed up. Attention, mostly. There’s less internal noise. The clarity that comes from knowing what’s actually yours to work on is real—and I wish I’d found it earlier. But I also understand why it took as long as it did. It takes enough evidence to finally give up on the old way.
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At 73, I’m still figuring it out—and that’s fine
I don’t want to make this sound more settled than it is.
There are still days when I catch myself frustrated about something I have no power over—a decision someone else made, a situation that’s unfolding without any input from me. The pull toward expecting things to be different from what they are doesn’t disappear. It just gets easier to catch and faster to release.
And there are still days when I don’t hold myself to the standard I know I’m capable of. When I take the easier route, let something slide that I should have addressed, and avoid the harder conversation because I don’t have the energy for it. The high expectations I’ve set for myself are not always met. That’s also part of the deal—holding a real standard doesn’t mean meeting it perfectly every day. It means taking it seriously, including when you fall short, and not renegotiating the standard downward just because you missed it.
What I don’t do anymore is confuse the two categories. I don’t hold myself responsible for outcomes that were never mine to determine, and I don’t let myself off the hook for things that genuinely were. That distinction—which took me an embarrassingly long time to actually live, not just understand intellectually—is the thing I keep returning to. Not as a resolution, but as a practice that continues.
At 73, I don’t know exactly how much time I have to keep at it. But I know it’s the right thing to keep at it.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
