Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn: Beggar Man and Woman behind a Bank (1630)

"Should this realization motivate me to stop engaging?"

I was never able to buy into the once-popular notion of continuous improvement. For me, that concept set utterly unrealistic Expectations because improvement, as well as most other phenomena, never occurs continuously. Intermittent might better describe improvement processes, if 'process' even qualifies as the proper descriptor. Some insisted that the continuous label was affixed for motivational purposes, though this insistence nudged me even closer toward disgust. I was never all that motivated to experience the impossible. How, I wondered, would setting impossible Expectations motivate anybody? Those seemed to create good reasons to not feel motivated, but despondent, and put-upon by whoever presumed the right to expect me to produce impossibilities.

So, I early on imprinted on the absurdity underlying much of what we label as process. Between the Continuous Improvement and the ever-curious Systemization Movements, room for modest humans seemed to shrink toward the infinitesimal. I quietly protested against what even I recognized as another inevitability. My professional life struggled to maintain some balance between bullshit labels and all-too-human capabilities available to satisfy ever-inflating Expectations. Performance reviews became philosophical works, explaining how failing to meet bullshit Expectations somehow managed to yield exceptional ratings. The metrics were supposed to satisfy somebody's Expectations, but not the hapless incumbents’ who could bring nothing more clever than second-order explanations to their assessments or their equally hapless supervisors’, who were paid to implement and maintain impossibly continuously improving processes.

It should surprise nobody that the business world devolved into dueling impossibilities, with nobody truly believing anybody's explanatory stories. Nothing works quite as expected. Upgrades produce ever-worsening results. Failure finally equaled success. It's apparently all in the assessments. Obscure edges justify expenditures. Nobody's quite as naive as they would have to be to believe the cover stories. We have developed a specialized language that permits bullshit Expectations to exceed themselves somehow while simultaneously utterly failing to achieve. Our incumbent proclaims the most successful first six months in office, while his popularity ratings continue to plummet. He never blushes when acknowledging anything fictional. The world is as he insists it is, without exception.

The process of aging seems to be one where Expectations increasingly become impossible to properly register. I can no longer distinguish between reasonable Expectations and their opposites, for I appear to have lost any sense of my own capabilities. I cannot look at a piece of work and adequately judge whether it's something I can reasonably accomplish or not. There was a time, back in my relative youth, when I could jump right in and consider it a challenge. I might not have been able to determine whether I could succeed, but I could routinely fool myself into believing that I could and therefore would succeed. I'd enter with a certain certainty, whether I could be reasonably sure or not. Now, I cannot tell. I understand that I'm older, and so I might not be capable of expending energy the way I once did back in my twenties. I tend to overextend myself and need to take a day off to recover from attempting to exceed my own modest Expectations.

I do what I can do. I sometimes manage to accomplish considerably more than I imagined I could, but the days when I could routinely exceed my Expectations seem to have passed. I must, I conclude, satisfy myself with more modest Expectations and motivations. I can do what I can do and little more. It's no longer a matter of picking myself up by my bootstraps if, indeed, it ever was. I must now engage, hopefully, without expecting superhuman performance from myself or anyone else. I apparently get the opportunity to exercise my more generous interpretations toward myself and my performances, understanding that I'm the one most likely to over-estimate my abilities for the curious purpose of motivating myself. One step ahead and two backward might be the best I can contribute now. Should this realization motivate me to stop engaging?

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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