I was disappointed tonight by my fantasy baseball team. I had been waiting all week to get to the weekend to watch the Friday-Saturday-Sunday games as those are typically the most important games during a fantasy baseball matchup, the deciding ones that determine who is eliminated and who advances to the next round, but my team totally blew it today. Mike Clevinger, one of my "stud" pitchers, was scratched an hour before the game due to a minor injury, so I didn't get to see his start (adding to the injury-marred start by 2-time defending NL Cy Young Jacob Degrom earlier this week), and my hitters combined to go like 4-for-35 with no HR's, no RBI's, and 2 runs. Not good at all and not exciting at all, just watching a bunch of swings and misses, pop ups, and walks. It reminds me of how disappointing fantasy baseball inherently is: everyone in our league goes into the season with high hopes, this is the year, I researched so much, I know who all the good players are, etc., etc., but by the end of the season everyone but one team will be disappointed without a championship. That's the nature of sports in general too: don't get your hopes up that your team will win; it's why I am against the whole "choking" label placed on teams/ players that are accused of choking just because they lose: they're only called chokers because people had too high of expectations of them; without the expectations they'd just be another one of the many losers.
I find in general that it's important not to go into anything with too high of expectations; Disappointment is actually harmful and can bring me down into a bad mood (I already got upset last week at MJ partially due to less than stellar fantasy baseball results). It's the same with any TV show or movie or social gathering or food item: it's better to be pleasantly surprised than to be bitterly disappointed. So many times I've heard a lot of good reviews about a movie and get amped up before watching....only to feel like I wasted 2 hour I'll never get back (these happen especially with Academy-Award winning movies or movies with high Rotten Tomatoes scores, putting a numerical value on the false hope of the movie. In fact, the most memorable things I've done or experienced are the ones where I didn't have much of an expectation going in, that I got so surprisingly good results that I got an adrenaline rush and my brain triggered endorphins that gave me a natural high. Meeting MJ was a very pleasant surprise: I moved into a new apartment not expecting anything, I met my future soulmate! I went into dodgeball as a fun way to relieve stress during law school: turned into a lifelong sport.
It's kind of like what they say about life; it's what happens when people are waiting for moments to never come, or life is what happens when you're making plans....and once in awhile during that down period that really gives a strong positive feeling. I think to that extent the way we digest news is somewhat set up for disappointment: we're just going about our day like nothing in the world is happening except what's going on in front of us, and then there's this huge news story that breaks on twitter, or someone posts on Facebook, or that one of your friends sends you, and it sends shockwaves: this weekend it was the news of RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)'s untimely passing on Friday night, sparking the fear that the Republicans will push through a Supreme Court seat through the Senate and get confirmed before the election, or before (the Democrats hope) a new president is elected. Of course this is bad news, but should we be disappointed by it, to the extent of posting "2020 is the worst year ever!" "I'm leaving the country!" and "The world is ending!" I think news is usually going to be bad, otherwise people wouldn't care that much about it and digest it, so we need to set our expectations pretty low to begin with. Not to trivialize Ginsburg's death, it is really a loss for the world as well as a bad time for the world as it is with the pandemic and racial tensions, but people passing away isn't a revolutionary event (unfortunately).
Speaking of disappointment, I opened a fortune cookie today and found inside.....nothing. No fortune. A fortune cookie without a fortune in it: does this mean I have no future? I hope not; hopefully this is not my last blog post ever.
Also, so stock market....the last several months caused most new investors' expectations to be raised sky high to the level of "stocks only go up" which is just a huge fallacy. If you can only be happy if the sports team you root for wins or only be happy if the stock market goes up, then disappointment is sure to follow.
The Asian languages I study are all unified on "disappointment," it's a kanji-based word meaning "loss" and "hope," loss of hope. I guess it's telling that there's no real antonym (word with opposite meaning) for "disappointment" in the English language. "Satisfaction" and "happiness" are the best Oxford dictionary could come up with, and the term I can think of is "pleasant surprise." Maybe that's a reflection on the fact we focus less on pleasant surprises than we dwell on the disappointments? The disappointments definitely stand out a lot and we tend to express them as complaints and feel strongly about them, meanwhile taking the pleasant surprises as naturally expected and a result of our own effort ("I somehow wound up in a high-paying job where I don't have to do that much work, it must have been all a product of my hard work!" whereas it should just be taken more as a pleasant surprise where good luck struck.
No comments:
Post a Comment