What I Expected from Life

We sure do live in a fantastic era. The world has changed in ways I’d never have predicted, and I’ve changed as well.

I was a child in the sixties and a teenager in the seventies. That was a very particular moment to be forming expectations about the future. We’d just put men on the moon. Everything in the culture told us that was the beginning of something instead of the end of it.

Magazines ran illustrations of orbital hotels. Television gave us a starship with a crew that argued about ethics. The assumption underneath all of it was that progress moved in one direction and that the direction was outward.

What I’ve learned since is that the future arrives. It just arrives somewhere else, doing something you weren’t watching for, while the thing you expected sits unbuilt with nobody able to say exactly why.

So this is an inventory. What blindsided me, what never showed up, and where my own life went instead.

The things I never predicted

Some of the events I’d never have predicted when I was a child:

• ➤The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union
• ➤A black man becoming president and a woman becoming Secretary of State
• ➤PCs becoming so common that it’s hard to imagine life without one
• ➤The collapse of the World Trade Center
• ➤That I’d buy a watch with more computing power, by several orders of magnitude, than a room-sized computer I used in college
• ➤That I’d see a city destroyed by a hurricane and watch the government drop the ball on helping the people in it
• ➤That the entire library of human knowledge would fit in my pocket and most people would use it to argue with strangers
• ➤That I’d carry a telephone everywhere and use it for almost everything except telephoning
• ➤That software would become the largest industry on earth
• ➤That machines would hold a conversation with me, and that I’d end up working alongside one every day

The watch one still stops me when I think about it properly. In college I worked on a machine that filled a room, needed its own cooling, and had a team of people whose entire job was keeping it running. What’s on my wrist right now would have been science fiction to everybody in that building, and I bought it without much thought and I complain when the battery gets low.

The Berlin Wall is the one I misjudged worst.

I grew up with the Cold War as a permanent feature of reality, the way weather is permanent. Nobody I knew treated it as a situation that could end. Then it ended, on television, in a few weeks, and the thing everybody had organized their fears around simply stopped existing.

What that taught me is that the largest changes don’t announce themselves in advance. They look impossible right up until they look inevitable, and there’s almost no period in between where they look likely.

The future that never arrived

On the other hand, I had some expectations that didn’t happen:

• ➤I expected the United States to establish a permanent lunar colony long ago
• ➤I expected a manned mission to Mars by now
• ➤I expected somebody to build a permanent underwater city
• ➤I expected nuclear power to become the main power source of the world
• ➤I expected flying cars, and I’m aware of how that sounds
• ➤I expected the paperless office. That’s the funniest one on this list given how I spent my career
• ➤I expected we would have cured more than we did
• ➤I expected the four-day week that all the automation was supposed to buy us

The moon one is the one I feel. We went, six times, and then we stopped, and a person born the year of the last landing is now in their fifties.

I couldn’t have believed that as a boy. If you’d told me we’d go to the moon and then not go back for the rest of my life, I would have assumed something terrible had happened. Nothing terrible happened. We just stopped, for reasons that made sense to somebody with a budget.

The paperless office is the one I find funny, and I’ve earned the right to find it funny.

I spent twenty years running computer operations for a major national retailer, and one of the projects I’m proudest of removed several pallets of paper a day from each of our distribution centers. Pallets. Every day. That was decades into the era when paper was supposed to have disappeared, and we were still shifting it by forklift.

The four-day week is the promise that never paid off. Every piece of automation I installed across thirty-three years was justified partly on the time it would save. All of it saved the time. None of the time came back to anybody. More work absorbed it. That’s a lesson about organizations and not about technology.

Twists, goals, and dreams

Then there’s my own life. That took directions I wouldn’t have guessed at any point before they happened. Every one of these came out of a conversation, an accident, or somebody asking me a question I hadn’t considered.

What I didn’t expect:

• ➤Being a widower
• ➤Becoming a professional bellydance photographer
• ➤Becoming a complete nut about renaissance faires and bellydance
• ➤Becoming a serious computer geek
• ➤Running computer operations for a major national retailer for twenty years
• ➤Writing books for a living, and writing rather a lot of them
• ➤Moving to Florida

The bellydance photography is the one people ask about.

I did that for nearly a decade and shot around twelve hundred performances, and nothing in my earlier life pointed at it. I was a computer operations man who bought a camera. Then somebody asked me to photograph a show, and then the shows kept happening, and at some point I looked up and it was a major part of who I was.

Being a widower is the one I won’t dress up. There’s no version of that I expected and no version I prepared for, and it reorganized everything that came after it. And, of course, I had some goals that didn’t happen:

• ➤I expected to be a professional, well published author by now
• ➤My goal in elementary school was to be a professional geologist, and I haven’t pursued that field at all
• ➤I wanted a huge collection of rocks and gems
• ➤I expected to be a scientist
• ➤I meant to learn a musical instrument properly, and never did

The geology one isn’t entirely a loss. I never worked in the field, and I’ve been reading about it for five decades and I still stop the car for a good roadcut. There’s a version of not achieving a goal where the interest survives the career, and that’s where I ended up with rocks.

The published author one is the strangest entry on this list, because it did happen and it happened so far outside the shape I imagined that I didn’t recognize it as the same goal. I pictured novels. What arrived was a hundred and thirteen books under my own name and fifty-four more written for other people, almost none of them fiction, in a career I hadn’t heard of when I set the goal.

The useful thing about having your expectations overturned this thoroughly is that it makes the next set easier to hold loosely. I still set goals. I have simply stopped assuming I know which of them will happen or what they’ll look like when they do. The current list:

• ➤I’d like to find a nice lady and settle down with her
• ➤To achieve the highest spiritual growth possible in my religion
• ➤To climb to the top of Mt San Gorgonio
• ➤To visit and photograph every renaissance-type faire in the United States
• ➤To produce a huge, extremely professional bellydance event
• ➤To finish the four novels I’m working on, get them published, and have them sell well
• ➤To produce a large renaissance faire
• ➤To keep writing until I can’t any more

And a few places I’d like to travel:

• ➤Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Hawaii, Turkey, Egypt, Switzerland, Rome, Iceland, Tonga and Antarctica
• ➤All of the national parks in the United States
• ➤The Scottish highlands
• ➤Anywhere with a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way properly

And a few things I’d like to do:

• ➤To dance
• ➤To use the rapier
• ➤To drum
• ➤Poser and Bryce, the 3D graphics programs, and PSP
• ➤To learn to cook something properly instead of adequately

There are still some people I’d like to meet, and by that I mean sit down with and have a real conversation:

• ➤Milla Jovovich
• ➤Rachel Brice, Mardi Love, Sashi, Ariellah, Zoe Jakes, and the other big bellydance names
• ➤Catherine Zeta-Jones
• ➤William Shatner
• ➤Lucy Lawless
• ➤The president of the United States, whoever he or she happens to be
• ➤Somebody who was in the room when a decision I’ve read about got made

If I suddenly found myself with five million dollars after taxes:

• ➤I’d gather up the very best bellydancers and produce a top-notch show
• ➤I’d create the perfect renaissance faire
• ➤I’d meet all my religious goals
• ➤I’d give half of it to charity
• ➤I’d help some of my friends meet their goals
• ➤I’d put on a good masquerade ball

And if I made some real money, say a hundred million dollars, I’d probably buy a castle.

What the inventory is for

I didn’t write any of this down to complain about the moon.

What strikes me, reading the four lists together, is how badly I did at the whole exercise.

Nearly everything on the first list arrived without warning. Nearly everything on the second seemed certain and never happened. The twists in my own life weren’t on either list, because they were the kind of thing a person says yes to.

That’s not a complaint. It’s close to the opposite. The unpredicted things have been better than the predicted ones, and by a wide margin. I’d trade the lunar colony for the twelve hundred performances I photographed, and I didn’t even know that trade was on offer.

The other thing I notice is how many entries on the goals list are things I could start this month. Learn an instrument.

Climb the mountain. Finish the novels. None of those are waiting on the world to cooperate. They’re waiting on me. That’s a more uncomfortable finding than any amount of disappointment about flying cars.

So I’m going to keep making lists like this. Not because I expect to get better at predicting, since sixty years of evidence says I won’t, but because writing down what you expected and then reading it back later is one of the few honest measurements a person gets.

Frequently Asked Questions