Expecting The Worst & Hoping For The Best

On disappointment, erotic surprises and the spiritual art of lowering the bar

Hello dear readers,

I return to you from the lands of souvlaki and soda bread…Greece and Ireland, respectively. It’s been a whirlwind month, steeped in sunshine, olive oil, rain and revelation.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. Mine, mostly. How high they soar. How reliably they crash.

You know the ones I mean…

This is going to be the best party EVER.
This is going to be the hottest date EVER.
This is going to be the most delicious meal EVER.
Cue: crushing disappointment.

There’s a pattern I keep noticing. The loftier the expectation, the more precarious the experience. The more I script the scene, the more likely the actors are to forget their lines. And yet, when I approach something…a dinner, a date, a dungeon, with zero grandeur and maybe even a dash of dread, I often walk away blinking in disbelief, quietly amazed.

Which, of course, spectacularly clashes with modern manifestation culture. The spiritual Insta-gurus tell us, Align your vibration. Expect miracles. Visualise your dream life into existence.

And truthfully? I believe some of it. I’m the person who trusts there’ll be a parking spot right outside. And reader… nine times out of ten, there it is.

But then I wonder, what’s that belief based on?
Experience? Privilege? Delusion? Quantum physics? Dumb luck?

The very definition of “expectation” is a belief that something will happen. And if belief shapes reality, as so many mystics, psychologists and TikTok witches claim, then maybe the trick lies in consciously choosing which beliefs to feed.

And yet… life isn’t an algorithm. It’s not always that clean.

Why does the parking spot manifest when I believe it will, only to vanish the moment I’m with someone who doesn’t? Is it conflicting vibrations? Belief as energetic democracy?

I see this play out, too, in my beliefs about men. Specifically, the belief that most will disappoint me in some way. I won’t go into the origin story, but when I carry that lens, surprise, surprise, disappointment often follows. Or rather, I find disappointment, because it’s what I’m looking for. The inverse of parking karma.

It’s humbling, really, how quietly powerful expectation is. How it shapes what we’re willing to see.

So lately, I’ve been experimenting with what I’ll call spiritual realism.
Expecting very little, sometimes even the worst, while staying secretly open to surprise. It’s like walking a tightrope between “this will probably be shit” and “but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it wasn’t?”

And weirdly, it’s working…