Disappointment
Imagine a world where this post was just a blank page, the disappointment was that there was no post. I might feel disappointment reading that post. Maybe you might too.
It’d feel like a cheap trick though, there wouldn’t be anything creative about it. It’d be a lazy joke at best. And a cop out at worst.
I totally thought about doing this, and as soon as I thought about doing it, I thought about writing the above. I did not think about writing the rest of this post, until I had written the above. This specific paragraph is actually the last paragaph I’m writing. I don’t know if it was better before I wrote it, but I’m keeping it anyway. I hope you’re not disappointed.
Expectations are interesting things. When I decide that I expect a future experience, deciding that I have decided to expect a future experience has dramatic effect on that experience.
If I expect something to go poorly, and it goes well, I generally feel better about such an experience than if I expected the same experience to go well, and it just went well.
If i expect something to go well, and it goes poorly, I generally feel worse about such an experience than if I expected the same experience to go poorly, and it goes poorly.
But it’s not so simple, most experiences are not good or bad experiences.
In World of Warcraft, you can log out in an Inn. Ya know, beer, women in loose clothing, men in loose clothing, goblins in loose clothing, night elves in loose clothing, pandarians in loose clothing, trolls in loose clothing, tauren in loose clothing, no dwarves, gnomes in loose clothing, undead in loose clothing, blood elves in loose clothing, orcs in loose clothing, tables, and chairs. All dancing about in their signature racial based dances, in loose clothing.
If you log out there, then log back in sometime in the future, your character will have obtained rested experience. Which means when you get experience from killing a naked murloc, or a night elf in loose clothing, it will award you with double the experience points. Doubling, quite literally, the value of that experience.
In some ways, in world of warcraft, your character can only set a positive expectation, thus deriving double value from their experiences, if you decide to log out in a rowdy inn full of people in loose clothing.
But here in real life, it’s rather difficult to find an inn where everyone is wearing loose clothing, and that will also let sleep on the table if you so choose to.
I think if we had Inns like in world of warcraft, experiences wouldn’t ever be disappointing. We could all get rested experience that currently we’re not getting, doubling the value of every experience we have.
New feature launches tomorrow. Get hyped!!!