A couple of weeks ago I played a round of golf on one of those evenings that gets manufactured for postcards. Low sun, no wind, course mostly empty. And I spent a few holes stewing. Not because I was playing badly. I was playing fine. I was stewing because I wasn’t playing the way I had decided, sometime that morning, I was going to play. I had a version of that round in my head before I ever hit a shot. I practiced well the day before. I watched a few extra YouTube videos that made everything click (you know what I’m talking about, you’ve been there too.) And the actual round, the real one, with the real light and the real quiet, kept getting compared to it and kept losing.
Somewhere around the third hole I looked up and realized I had been standing inside a perfect evening for over an hour and hadn’t been there for any of it.
The Script
I’m sure you’ve done a version of this. The vacation you spent managing instead of taking. The dinner party you hosted but never attended because you were too busy monitoring whether it was going well. The promotion that arrived and felt like nothing because it didn’t arrive the way you’d rehearsed it. The experience shows up, and instead of having it, we grade it. Against what? Against a script nobody wrote down. A script we don’t even remember writing.
That’s the trade we keep making. We swap the experience we’re in for a running commentary on how it measures up to the one we expected. And the commentary always wins the airtime.
Here’s the strange part. The script was never the point. Nobody books a beach trip because they want to hold an image of a beach trip in their head. We want the thing itself. The sand, the specific laugh, the meal that surprises us. But by the time the thing arrives, the image has been sitting there for weeks, getting polished, getting specific. And a polished image is a brutal standard. Reality is full of texture the image never included. Traffic. A tired kid. Your own mood. So the real thing, which is the only thing that was ever available, gets marked down for failing to match a rendering.
What the Research Shows
I’m sure it won’t surprise you that this has been studied. Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert ran a project years ago where they pinged thousands of people on their phones at random moments and asked two questions. What are you doing, and what are you thinking about. Almost half the time, people’s minds were somewhere other than what they were doing. And here’s the finding that stuck with me. The wandering itself predicted unhappiness, even when the mind wandered somewhere pleasant. Being mentally elsewhere cost people more than the elsewhere was worth. The paper’s title said it plainly. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
Kahneman circled this from another angle with what he called the focusing illusion. And from it he coined one of my favorite phrases: nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it. The imagined version of anything, good or bad, swells to fill your attention. The lived version has to share space with everything else that’s actually happening. So the fantasy is always more vivid than the moment, and we keep concluding the moment is the disappointment. It isn’t. It’s just the only one of the two that’s real.
The Stoics (my people) got here two thousand years earlier without an iPhone study. Seneca wrote that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. Epictetus went further and said it’s not events that disturb us, it’s our judgments about events. The expectation is a judgment we passed in advance. We sentenced the experience before it happened. Then we served the sentence ourselves, without parole.
Here’s where it connects to the body. I watch people do this with training constantly. Someone comes in carrying a predetermined idea of how the workout is supposed to feel. Strong, smooth, like last Tuesday. And today doesn’t feel like last Tuesday, because they slept five hours and their kid is sick and their nervous system is negotiating a different deal. The session in front of them is actually fine. Productive, even. But they can’t feel it, because they’re too busy measuring it against the session in their head. The gap reads as failure. So a perfectly good hour in their body becomes an hour of quiet frustration about a body that didn’t show up as ordered. Or inversely. Someone comes in with the expectation of fear and failure. They told themselves this workout will be too tough. That they can’t do it. Fear and scarcity prevail.
(If you’re a clinician, you know this patient. Recovery going objectively well, week over week, and they’re miserable, because it isn’t going the way they pictured. You’re not treating the tissue at that point. You’re treating the gap.)
Holding the Map
None of this means expectations are the enemy. You can’t plan a business, a season, or a Tuesday without them. Expectations are how we aim. The problem starts when we keep holding the map after we’ve arrived at the territory. When the picture of the thing stays open in one window while the thing itself plays in another, and our eyes never leave the first window.
So the idea isn’t to stop wanting things to go well. The idea is smaller. It’s noticing when the comparison is running. That flicker of irritation on a good day. That flatness inside something you waited months for. Those are usually the tell. Not that the experience failed, but that you’re not in it. You’re in the version. And the version can’t give you anything. It has no light, no sound, no other people in it. It’s a rendering.
The evening on that golf course didn’t change after the third hole. Same sun, same quiet. The only thing that changed is that I finally showed up to it. Which means the first hour wasn’t taken from me. And the rest of the round opened up a new level of enjoyment.