For most of my life, I believed happiness came from getting what I wanted. If events went according to plan, I felt satisfied. If things didn’t unfold the way I pictured them, I felt disappointed. My expectations silently controlled how my day went, long before anything even happened.
But expectations are tricky—they set a standard that reality can almost never match.
Think about it:
We imagine the perfect conversation, the perfect test result, the perfect reaction from someone we care about. And when reality doesn’t align, we suffer not because the moment was bad, but because it wasn’t what we expected.
I realized how many times I ruined my own day without anything actually going wrong. It was my story about the moment—not the moment itself—that created my frustration.
Letting go of expectations doesn’t mean lowering standards or losing ambition. It means releasing the rigid belief that things must happen a certain way in order for us to be okay.
When we loosen our grip, we make space for reality to simply be reality. We allow surprises. We allow imperfection. We allow life.
Ironically, when I stopped demanding perfection from every upcoming moment, I actually began to experience more joy. I became more present, more flexible, and more grateful. Life didn’t get easier—my relationship with life did.
Letting go taught me that happiness is not something the world hands to us.
It is something we create by choosing how tightly we hold on.