The Expectation Gap
Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash
The COVID pandemic that has taken over half a million American lives overshadowed what had previously been the largest public health crisis in our country. An epidemic of self-inflicted deaths -- attributed to drug overdoses, alcohol disease and suicides -- was causing life expectancy in the United States to fall for the first time in decades, starting in 2015 and continuing in subsequent years.
Classified collectively as "deaths of despair" by Princeton economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, deaths from these three causes have accounted for an estimated 600,000 American lives lost over the last twenty years, more than deaths due to COVID (though not nearly the same time period). Their intense but important book by the same name, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, attempts to understand this spike — who is falling victim and what’s causing it.
Their finding in analyzing the data is that these deaths are overwhelmingly happening among whites without a college education. Most of the rise in deaths of despair are attributable to this group and it appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon, with few other countries showing such a disturbing increase. What the book was less conclusive about is the answer to why this is happening. What is it psychologically that is causing so many Americans to feel depressed and desperate? As economists, the authors don’t offer so much of an answer as they do a statistical correlation: lack of a four-year college degree. This attribute, more than income, employment status or other possible causes, is their primary explanation.
From my perspective, the book fails to identify what I suspect is actually the biggest culprit for low self-esteem, depression and ultimately these deaths of despair: what I call the Expectation Gap. I haven't found an equivalently credible book describing this psychological phenomenon, but this TEDx Talk by Nat Ware, the founder of a nonprofit consulting firm called 180 Degrees, summarizes it as "we’re unhappy when our expectations of reality exceed our experiences of reality."
Ware identifies three categories of this Expectation Gap:
Imagination Gap -- we imagine something (often aided by digitally enhanced images) being better than it really is.
Interpersonal Gap -- we think other people's reality is better than our own reality.
Intertemporal Gap -- we believe our lives are getting worse, rather than better over time.
Social media, which was created and proliferated in popularity at precisely the time deaths of despair began to rise, directly exacerbates all three of these Expectation Gaps. Much has been written about the deleterious psychological effects of social media, particularly in teens, but the most pernicious effect is the Expectation Gap it instills in users.
Think about your own social media habits. We don't typically post crappy photos of ourselves during our biggest disappointments. We post happy photos, where the light hits us just right (with a little help from that Instagram filter), when we have great news to share -- humble brags about our careers, vacations or family.
Now, consider that posting behavior repeated across everyone you know, everyone on the Internet, and you immediately realize why your Facebook feed is the ultimate Expectation Gap generator. Everyone looks fantastic, visiting beautiful places, eating spectacular food -- all amplifying the Imagination Gap, setting unrealistic expectations about everything we could do, see or be. All your friends appear to be living better, more successful, more fulfilled lives -- intensifying the Interpersonal Gap, causing you to dig even deeper to show something, anything, that compares favorably to your friends. Which creates your own unrealistic narrative of past escapades and achievements -- provoking the Intertemporal Gap when your present doesn't seem as great as your own heavily curated history.
Making matters worse, thanks to social media we no longer set our expectations based on our physically proximate social groups. Twenty years ago, we might have been content reaching a local maxima -- being better at basketball than the other kids at school, or the best singer in the church choir, or promoted at work faster than your peers. Now everyone compares themselves to a global maxima. Kids don't just want to be good at basketball, they expect to be LeBron James. They don't just want to win the talent show, they expect to be Beyonce. They don't just want a successful career, they expect to be Steve Jobs. Our expectations are constantly heightened to unrealistic levels, inevitably setting us up for disappointment.
How impossible do those expectations seem if you don't have a college education? I believe the correlation between deaths of despair and the lack of a four-year degree that Case and Deaton discovered is just a symptom of what's really going on: a massive Expectation Gap that feels even greater if you lack the means, circumstances and ability to have even a chance of achieving those outcomes.
Our dreams are more and more unattainable, while our means are more and more unavailable.
Meanwhile, the machinery of social media continues, ever-worsening the Expectation Gap. We are wired to crave social comparison, striving to project how great our lives are while simultaneously envying the lives of others. Even as our lives are empirically better, our widening expectations mean we are never satisfied. Social sites feed that addiction, the more we view, share, post, and like, the more money they make. Low self-esteem is good for business.
So what's the answer? Set low expectations for yourself and you'll be happy? That notion, of low (or even just realistic) expectations is so anathema to contemporary U.S. culture that it seems blasphemous to even suggest. We're supposed to dream big, set ambitious goals, believe we can be anything we want to be. But that mindset, that constant setting of increasingly unrealistic expectations, feels like it could be creating a mental health crisis of generational magnitude.
Overcoming the Expectation Gap will require a recalibration of our values. We could try regulating social media, but those platforms are just giving us what we want -- what we click on. What we need to teach ourselves and our children is that setting goals is great, as long as they are realistic. We should pursue passions, not outcomes. We shouldn’t calibrate ourselves against others for our own sense of self-worth. And we should know that our lives are better than we think.