Lower Your Expectations, Not Your Standards

The twins were four years old. Soccer season. I had this vision — I don't know where it came from, some composite of every dad movie I'd absorbed over a lifetime — of my kids absolutely loving it. Running across the field, cheering, eating orange slices at halftime like it was the best day of their lives.

One of them sat down in the middle of the field during the first drill. Just sat. Cross-legged. Looked at a bug.

The other cried because a kid she didn't know ran too close to her.

I drove home telling myself it would get better. It didn't. We lasted four weeks before I accepted we were a non-soccer family, and my daughter has since discovered she is, in fact, a bug person, which I respect enormously.

I didn't know it at the time, but what I was doing in those four weeks — holding onto a prediction reality had already disproved — is exactly what Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K) of HealthyGamerGG breaks down in a recent video called Your Standards Are Way Higher Than They Should Be. The framework he lays out is sharp enough that I've been thinking about it all week, partly because it explains a lot about parenting, and partly because it explains some things about me that I'm less comfortable sitting with.

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The core distinction Dr. K draws is between expectations and standards, and it's one of those ideas that sounds obvious until you realize you've been confusing them your entire life.

An expectation, in his framing, is a prediction — your brain's best guess about what will happen. A standard is what you're willing to accept, the floor of what counts as good enough. They are not the same thing. Treating them as interchangeable is, he argues, a source of serious unnecessary suffering.

"The gap between what we expect and what we get," Dr. K says, "that is like the size of the pain that we experience."

The brain, as he explains it, is fundamentally a prediction machine. We evolved to make guesses about the future and then update those guesses when reality corrects us. Pain is the mechanism. When your prediction misses, it hurts — and that hurt is supposed to make you revise the prediction. The impala that nearly got taken by a crocodile should probably update its watering hole assumptions. The child who loans money to the same friend three times and never gets it back should probably update hers.

The problem is that updating hurts. So instead of updating, we defend. Denial, rationalization, the whole toolkit. We keep making the same prediction — this time my dad will show up, this time my boss will respond, this time this person will be who I need them to be — because the alternative is sitting with what's actually true about someone we love or a situation we're stuck in.

That part of the video hit somewhere specific for me. There's a version of this I've lived as a parent that I don't talk about much. The expectation that I'd be a certain kind of dad — present, patient, endlessly engaged — and then the actual daily reality of parenting seven-year-old twins while also trying to work and function like a human being. I held that expectation for a long time as though it were a standard. As though falling short of it meant I was failing, not just predicting wrong.

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The standards piece is where Dr. K earns his nuance, though, and also where I think his argument gets more complicated.

He says you shouldn't lower your standards — the floor of what you'll accept in a relationship, a job, your own behavior. But then he also says some people's standards are too high, and not for the reason you'd think. He calls it a compensatory standard: the bar you set impossibly high not because you genuinely want the thing at that height, but because a lower bar feels like an admission of failure.

His own example — which he tells as a self-reported anecdote from his own college years — is failing classes as a freshman and responding by setting an "A or nothing" standard. If he got a B on the first exam, he'd drop the course. By his own account, that pattern contributed to taking five and a half years to graduate. The standard wasn't aspirational. It was protective. If the goal is unattainable, you never have to confront whether you're actually capable.

I've seen this in parenting. The parent who, after feeling like they failed in some specific way — missed a recital, lost their temper, forgot something important — responds by setting an unreachable new bar for themselves. Not because they genuinely believe they can maintain it, but because the unreachable bar is more comfortable than the question of what a realistic good-enough standard actually looks like. I'm not talking about other parents here.

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The last part of the video is where I want to be careful, because Dr. K ventures into neuroscience territory that he himself flags as simplified — and I think it's worth saying clearly: it is very simplified, in ways that matter.

He argues that wanting, liking, and contentment run on separate brain circuits — dopamine for wanting, endocannabinoids for liking, serotonin for contentment — drawing on research associated with neuroscientist Kent Berridge, who has done genuinely interesting work distinguishing "wanting" from "liking" at the neural level. The wanting/liking split has real research behind it. But the specific claim that endocannabinoids govern liking and serotonin governs contentment is, in the current science, a lot more contested and uncertain than a tidy three-system diagram implies. Neuroscience is not a clean map. Dr. K acknowledges he's simplifying, which I appreciate — but I'd undersell myself if I presented it to you as settled fact, because it isn't.

What does hold up, even if the neuroscience underneath it is messy, is the phenomenological point: the things we want are not reliably the things that make us happy. Dr. K uses multiplayer video games as his example — wanting to play, then not even enjoying it when you do. As a parenting example, it maps almost too neatly onto the fantasy of the perfect family Saturday, the one you've been looking forward to all week, that somehow becomes a series of small disasters from which everyone retreats to separate rooms by 2 p.m.

"The things that you want, you may not even like," he says. "And the things that you like, you may not even want. These are two independent variables."

That's a strange thing to sit with. It means the standard you're holding out for — the relationship, the career, the version of yourself as a parent — might not actually be tracking what would make you content. It might be tracking something older. Something you built in response to a wound, not in response to an honest accounting of what you actually need.

I'm not sure I've fully reckoned with that in my own life. I suspect I'm not alone.

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Marcus Obi is a staff writer at Buzzrag covering parenting, family, and the gap between the life you imagined and the one you're actually living. He is a stay-at-home dad to seven-year-old twins and a former marketing manager who should have seen the soccer thing coming.