Expectations and just chilling

I’ve been watching a bit of Community

It is a great show and very funny. At least the first season that I’ve watched is anyway.

The main point I want to get across though is that the show actively promotes lower expectations by showing how liberating and happy that can make people feel. For example, in the show the star high school quarterback was crippled with expectations and ended up deliberately injuring himself so he didn’t have to face the final game. Then in community college where noone cared he was free to just play and enjoy the game again. Basically much of the show is about not caring about expectations anymore because noone expects much from community college students and that one shouldn’t beat themselves up so much if they don’t achieve everything they set out to.

Just enjoying the journey, chilling with friends, having heaps of fun and doing stupid shit is pretty good too. Well that is my take from the series. As I think about work and how infinite it is, I often think why we push ourselves to do even more stuff at or for work. It’s not like there’s a finite amount and once you push yourself to get it all done in extra time, then you can relax and do all the things you were holding off on doing. Work is the ultimate time sink, the more you put in, the more it takes. There will always be work to do at work. No matter how much effort or time you put into it. So why not do all those other things you wanted to do for yourself when you can? Do a good job at work, for whatever definition of “good” you want to use, then leave and do the shit that really matters to you. In the end the people who get ahead in life are either truly doing what they like and/or extremely gifted anyway and/or manipulative psychopaths and/or super charming or hot.
So let’s all be a community and not worry about killing ourselves for European handmade faucets or luxury cars made from unobtanium. Time you spend doing that is time you miss out doing better stuff, like upgrading to KDE4.6 or playing soccer or whatever floats your boat.