Keep Your Expectations Low

The secret to happiness

Har Narayan
2 min readAug 30, 2024
Photo by Johen Redman on Unsplash

The most dangerous people are the ones who don’t expect anything from anyone. That’s almost always the secret to living a happy life.

When you don’t expect or keep your expectations low from everyone, this automatically makes you happy, because you know that, no one is going to give you what you want, or no one is going to help you do the things you want to get done. And this way, your emotions are constant toward everyone, you don’t yell at them, or feel sad for not doing your work — you control your emotions — and you learn to live to happily this way.

The higher the expectations from other people, the more unhappy you’re going to be. That couldn’t be more true. So just keep your expectations low or entirely not need to expect anything from anyone. That’s quite hard but if you can reach that level, you’ve got something powerful.

But the problem is that we as humans, constantly need the help of other people — to live our lives — to run our life. But hey, don’t forget that there are tens of thousands of people already living alone — not expecting anything from anyone: growing their food, generating their electricity, and building their own world alone — and are happy in life.

I can’t stretch it enough, if you want to be happy living in a social circle or in a community, keep your expectations low from other people. That’s it.

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