“Don’t expect anything from anyone and you will never get hurt and always be happy.” Bingo!! So finally  a very simple mantra to be super happy!! Right? Oh wait, but do you really think it’s practically possible to practice this mantra? You must have heard and read a lots and lots of quotes similar to this, mostly on social media. But have you ever wondered if it is actually this simple to be happy? No matter how cool this sounds but it’s almost impossible not to expect anything from anybody in this world.

You cannot “not expect” from your parents who brought you into this world and did everything for you they could possibly do. You do and you will always expect the same love, care and blessings from them. Same goes on with your siblings. Then comes  your   friends.  All the people whom  we  say hello to, are not our friends. When I say friends here I mean real friends, whom you chose to be friends with. Surely you expected them to be with you in your good and bad times, laugh with you and sometimes cry with you. If you think you don’t expect these from your friends, well then don’t call them friends.  Just call them ‘hangout buddies’, ‘chat buddies’, ‘videogame buddies’, or ‘get high with buddies’ and so on. As real friends stand by you, no matter what. Now you know whom to call your “real friends.”

You are in a relationship with someone. So what made you go into this relationship? Of course, you expected your love/spouse to love you, care for you, be loyal and faithful to you. If you don’t expect these from them, then you are not actually in a relationship. You are just fooling around. Oh! Come on, let me just say it, you are just ‘playing around.’

You work somewhere and you don’t work alone for sure, there must be your co-workers who are expected to do their part of work. I guess, that’s how a company or an organisation works, right? Why would a company invest their money on people whom they don’t even expect to work?

Okay, leave about the family, love, friends and co-workers. Do you think it’s only these people who you expect from? If you think ‘yes’, think about it again. There are many people whom we don’t know at all but we still expect something from them. You go to a restaurant with the expectation that the cook will make you some good food .  If you don’t expect that, just eat some loaves of bread when you are hungry if it’s only about satisfying your hunger. You go to a salon and expect the hair dresser to give you a good haircut or else you wouldn’t be there. You get into a bus, taxi, plane or whatever and you expect the driver/pilot to take you to your destination safely. But sometimes accidents do happen but that doesn’t mean you stop using any means of transportation. In a same way, doctors are not always able to save a patient’s life but we always expect that they will, that’s why we take them to a doctor.

Everyday we expect many things from many people knowingly or unknowingly and sometimes they just turn out to be a bad decision. But that doesn’t mean that we stop expecting from every single person. However, we can stop ourselves by getting hurt from those particular people. If you literally want to live without a single expectation from anyone, you better start living in woods or in the Himalayas where there are no other people but that doesn’t sound very good. It’s good if you do that for a week or so but for your whole life, that sounds a bit difficult, I guess. Take it as you go to watch a movie with an expectation that it’s good but it turns out to be a total disaster. But do we stop watching movies after that? Well, we don’t.

Moral of the story is that it’s not as easy as it sounds not to expect from people. We do it all the time, we just can’t help it. But what we can actually do is that we can lower our expectations as least as possible so that when the expectations are not fulfilled, they don’t break us down into pieces. Stay happy folks!!