The Search
When what we’re shown becomes what we expect.
Listen to this article
For a long time, I couldn’t figure out where some of my expectations came from.
Not the ones someone explicitly taught me. The quieter ones. The things that just felt like how life was supposed to go.
What made the question stranger was that sometimes I knew better.
Intellectually, I could look at an expectation and think, That doesn’t actually make sense. But knowing that didn’t always change the feeling underneath it.
So I started wondering: If I don’t believe this anymore, why do I still expect it?
One possible answer came from writing fiction.
Writing changed the way I watch movies. Once you’ve had to construct a story yourself, you start noticing how much gets left out. You choose which moments matter. You compress time. You skip the ordinary parts. You decide where the story begins and where it ends.
I noticed this recently while reviewing a movie about a relationship.
By the end, the conflicts had been resolved. The relationship had reached a satisfying place. The story worked.
But where the movie ended was probably where the actual relationship would begin.
There would be more disagreements. Old patterns might return. New problems would appear. There would be ordinary Tuesdays that weren’t worth putting in a movie.
The movie wasn’t doing anything wrong.
It was selecting.
And that made me wonder how well I understood that distinction before I had enough experience of my own.
Maybe some of my expectations came from things I had seen but didn’t yet know how to put in context.
Movies. TV. Other people. The parts of life that happened in front of me while the rest happened somewhere else.
None of it had to be fake.
That’s the part I hadn’t considered.
I kept wondering who or what had taught me to expect certain things. But maybe nobody explicitly taught me.
Maybe I inferred what was normal from what I was shown.
And what I was shown didn’t have to be false.
It only had to be incomplete.
A highlight doesn’t have to be false to give you the wrong idea. You just have to mistake the sample for the distribution.