Experience, expectations and an alternative view of life

An idea that has always fascinated me is that of experience. In particular I am intrigued by the process of becoming more experienced as you move through life, and the resultant change that this leads to in your opinions and outlook. There is the famous phrase that if you aren’t a socialist when you are young then you are heartless, but if you aren’t a Tory when you are older then you are a failure. From my own personal experience, when I was younger things that I found abhorrent, e.g. adultery, now seem at least more understandable in certain circumstances, even if I still don’t (yet) condone them. However there does seem to be a natural brake on this process which is that it seems that you can’t go quicker (and therefore gain more experience) than your environment allows – you can’t “bruler les etapes” as they say in French; a bright young thing fresh out of university can’t normally be CEO because other people, clients and business around him don’t typically allow it, (Mark Zuckerberg being the obvious exception largely because of the social networking environment in which he finds himself as well as the fact that he is gifted). In consulting I believe that to be successful in the long term you can’t go more quickly than your clients are prepared to go (despite the fact that this can often be contradictory to the quarterly mentality you sometimes find in the industry). I’m not sure what the exact point of this rambling is, although I suspect I’ll come back to it in the years to come....

Another rambling thought I had recently was the importance of expectations to enjoyment; the most obvious one is anticipation of presents at Christmas for children – the run up to Christmas is just as, if not more, enjoyable than the mad rush to open presents on the morning of the 25th. I wondered if this can be extended to life more generally and whether or not life is punctuated by a series of moments in which you set your expectations for the next period. In a nutshell, when you’re a child growing up the world seems to be your oyster and you can do anything – dreams are encouraged. Then the reality of adult life bites and you suffer a series of reality checks all the way through until your mid life crisis before things start picking up again. The reality of life during any given period would be what made you decide whether or not expectations needed to be managed up or down ahead of the next period. Whether or not you perceived life as being good or bad would essentially be whether or not you were resetting your expectations upwards or downwards at each recalibration. Again another rambling without a precise point, but I thought I’d share it anyway.