I’ve always known that there is a proportionate relationship between disappointment and expectation, but I’ve never been exactly sure how to quantify it.
My own experience, like yours, is that the greater the expectation about someone or something, the greater the disappointment if that someone or something fails. If you didn’t expect much, on the other hand, then you don’t find yourself very hurt by disappointment.
(In this regard, I have observed that some people cultivate low-expectations in many areas of life as a kind of coping mechanism: that is to say, they deliberately keep their hopes down as a subconscious way of insulating themselves from the pain of disappointment. This is the fearful self-preservation, it seems to me, that lies behind most cynics and skeptics, as well as a great many sarcastic individuals. They present themselves as wise, cosmopolitan, hard-nosed realists. In fact, however, many of them are just simply afraid of getting their hopes up about anything important.)
In the wake of Sunday’s painful loss, I have been contemplating my experience of Packer-fan disappointment. I am confirmed in my understanding that disappointment is the negative counterpart to expectation, and I have come to the conclusion that expectation is three-dimensional. That is to say, expectation has height, it has length, and it has depth. As a function of expectation, therefore, disappointment can be measured in terms of volume.
The “height” of expectation is perhaps the most obvious dimension, for we speak routinely about ‘high’ and ‘low’ expectations. In the case of the Packers, the expectations were extremely high. Indeed, at certain points in the season, they literally could not have been higher, inasmuch as there was talk of perfection and doing what no team in NFL history had ever done before.
The “length” of expectation is less talked about, but it is clearly a significant factor. When I say ‘length,’ I’m thinking in terms of time. If I have high expectations about a thing for only a day or two, the level of disappointment is not nearly so great as if I had harbored those high expectations over the course of many days – even weeks and months. The longer an expectation is in place, the more ingrained it becomes. And the more ingrained an expectation is, the more profound the disappointment when the expectation does not come to fruition. In the case of the Packers, the “length” of expectation was about as long as it can be for a football team. From the conclusion of last year’s Super Bowl until the conclusion of last Sunday’s game: that was the length of time during which we have been expecting these Packers to win next month’s Super Bowl.
Finally, there is the issue of “depth,” and this is a very individual matter. In other words, virtually all Packer fans had “high” and “long” expectations for this team. How deep one’s expectations go, however, is a personal matter. Some fans are rather casual, while others are very intense. Some fans watch the game when they don’t have anything else going on, while other fans bump everything else in their lives in order to see the game. And so on.
I can’t say for anyone else how “deep” their expectations went. For me? Well, I’m a guy who cares enough to write a blog about football and the Packers a couple of times a week. For you? Well, you care enough to read a blog about the Packers.
So where does all of this lead? First, to a formula:
D = (–1) Eh x El x Ed
In other words, “disappointment” equals the negative of the “height of expectation” times the “length of expectation” times the “depth of expectation.” And, as we explained above, Packer fans’ expectations could not have been any higher or any longer than they were. And so if, for any given fan, the expectations also ran pretty deep, then he or she is experiencing a truly significant volume of disappointment these days.
You and me both.
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