Triple Post Tuesday: Human Expectation

This could easily be a follow-up to my impatience post, but I feel it is more of a stand-alone idea.

I've always found it interesting how much inherent expectation society builds into people. Regardless of what it is about, people always seem to expect more quality, harder work, a better life, and whatever else you can think of. This has become especially true as the global economy has developed and global awareness has come with it. I have a few specific examples.

The first example is how people expect their quality of life to always be better. I find it amazing how successful commercials are at convincing people that so many things are necessary for their survival and/or economic status else their position in society be challenged. Along this same line of thought, it's interesting how people are starting to apply the human standard to everything. It's seems contradictory how people advocate for fair treatment of animals by calling it "humane." I'm not sure if they're arguing that it's inhuman to not treat the animals that way or that we should be treating the animals like humans, but either way it's imposing an expectation on all people, and unintentionally pitting societies against each other. Just because one society idolizes an animal and another eats it doesn't mean that either society is wrong or somehow less civilized.

The second and more personally-relevant example is that of emotion. It seems to me that the people around me who voice their opinion feel that because they exist in this society, they are entitled to always be surrounded by good feelings and that all bad things like fear and being tired should be banished to the darkest corners of the Earth. Through the same Disney-influence that affects how we view having a family, it also affects how we think we should feel. Such movies always feature characters being happy whenever possible and feeling negative emotions only when the evil character appears, and so it might give one the impression that they should always be entitled to happiness, which I feel is impossible. People need variety, and even someone being happy all the time could be viewed as a problem just because they could be seen as denying anything which they could see as hurting them. I prefer to believe in people being neutral (or at least indifferent towards their emotions) much of the time, as this seems to make more sense from my experience. You can ask people how they are feeling at any point during the day, but unless they have a very strong emotion accompanied by a reason (I'm tired because I didn't get any sleep last night, I'm depressed, etc.) they will probably give you the societally preferable answer, or the answer of least resistance ("I'm fine/happy/good"). This could be due to their not feeling anything noteworthy, not wanting any trouble over the initiator's predicted reaction to a different response, or just because they don't want to deal with that sort of thing.

It really does surprise me how much society influences the way we think.