I was thinking about anticipation today, and I decided that there are four ways in which I anticipate something. There is negative anticipation, neutral anticipation, positive anticipation, and experiential anticipation. The first one on my list, negative anticipation, is also known as dread. It's when I just don't want to do something, because it's going to be horrible, but I know I have to for whatever reason. I just got some very expensive, very painful periodontal work done on Monday, and I was absolutely dreading it (but that's a whole other post). There are many other examples. They differ greatly in severity—some things fill me with extreme anxiety; some just slightly annoy me—and in type—dreading periodontal work is very dissimilar to dreading a difficult conversation with my spouse—but they all share the property of negative anticipation.
The flip side of this is positive anticipation or eagerness. This is the feeling of looking forward to something. Again, these things can be very different in scale and type, and they are highly personal to me (I couldn't care less about the new season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, but it seems to Lil' S1's favorite thing in the world at the moment), but they are all things I am very eager to do.
Neutral anticipation is in between dread and eagerness. It's basically normal life—going to my job, running errands, shuttling the boys around. Most the time, these things are not negatively or positively anticipated by me. They just are.
The last type of anticipation, which I call experiential anticipation, is the most interesting, I think. This is when I want the experience of something, but I don't really want to do it. And note, wanting the experience of something is not the same thing as wanting the outcome of something. It's a journey-versus-destination thing. I didn't go to college don't just to get a degree or even just to get the knowledge that college afforded me; I wanted to actually go to college.
I think exercise is a good illustration of these four types of anticipation. Sometimes I dread exercise and don't do it or only do it because I feel compelled to do it some reason (usually health benefits or aesthetics).* Sometimes I just do it because it's part of my routine, and I don't really think much of it. Other times I really like it and look forward to it. Then there are yet other times, and these probably constitute a majority of the time, when I don't look forward to exercise as an activity, but I look forward to it as an experience. It's enriching and rewarding, and not just because of the results, but because of the act itself. So I want to do it, even though at that moment I might not "like" it.
*I rarely have negative anticipation for exercise, but I have had it before. I used to dread wrestling tournaments that required me to wake up early in the morning, but that's probably more due to the waking up early in the morning part than the exercise part. It's why I've never done the Army Ten-Miler here in DC. I was going to sign up for it once when S and a bunch of our friends did it, but then I realized I would have to wake up at 6:30 am, and I was like nope. I foresaw myself lying in bed the night before staring at the clock at 1:30 am, conversing with myself Okay, if I fall asleep right now, I can still get five hours. But you can't fall asleep right now, you fool! That's the entire problem! and didn't want any part of that.
I realized that as I've gotten older I anticipate more and more things experientially. I want to do them, but I don't want to do them. This dawned on me the other day when I was walking out of a networking event. I serve on an advisory board for my graduate school alma mater, and we had our annual in-person conference yesterday. As I was walking out of the building when it was over, I felt this strong sense of relief that it was over, but it wasn't relief like that was painful. It was a satisfying sense of relief like I've done my duty. I did a thing that is enriching and rewarding, and that I like doing—I genuinely enjoy interacting with all these interesting people I would never interact with otherwise—but for some reason I'm never particularly eager to do. Like, if Thursday evening I got an email saying the conference had been postponed a month, I would not have been bummed in the slightest. I would have thought Okay, cool, I have other things to do, anyway.
Travel is another great example of something I often have experiential anticipation for. Going to India this summer was wonderful. It was super fun, and I had a great time, and I would do it again, but I'm saying that in retrospect. In the lead-up to it, I was not super stoked about it, even though I knew that I was going to like it. It's kinda weird. And I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's neither; maybe it's just a thing. On the one hand, things I used to have positive anticipation for have been shifted into the experiential anticipation category. I've outgrown a lot of my this is going to be the coolest thing in the world exuberance. As a child and young adult, there would be events—games, parties, concerts, etc.—that my insides would be churning over, in the best way possible, in anticipation. And I just don't feel that so much anymore.
On the other hand, why is that a bad thing? I have other things in my life to replace this feeling. I mean, a big reason I used to anticipate things so positively was the glimmer of hope Maybe the girl I like will be there, and this was true even if I didn't like a particular girl at the time. But that hasn't been a relevant thought in nearly 20 years. I think my shift in how I anticipate things might just be part of a natural progression away from a desire for excitement to one of satisfaction. And the answer to my question is that it's not actually a bad thing.
Alright that's all for today. Until next time...
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