Yesterday night I was thinking, life is so short… although I may have another 50 years to live based on statistics of average life expectancy… but that’s just if I am lucky (and if I take care of my health). One in four Asian will die of cancer. And that’s just cancer only…

What if I am not so lucky and die early, say maybe not too young, but perhaps at middle age (e.g. 50+)? That means from now onwards, I may only have another 30 years or so.

Furthermore, out of the X number of years I have left with my loved ones, a significant proportion of our time will go to career/work, and sleep hours. In fact we may only actually have 1/3 of our lives spent on anything else besides working and sleeping, which perhaps takes up about 2/3 of our time.

Then of course, out of the 1/3 time left, some will be spent on our individual stuff and doing other menial things like housework, etc… so in actual fact only much less than 1/3 of our lives will be spent doing things together with our loved ones…

And whether we make that little amount of time spent together meaningful time spent or not will depend on how we use the time. Thinking about this, I really feel guilty about feeling angry or upset sometimes or being unreasonable because of little things. It’s really meaningless to be angry or upset at each other when you think that we may only have so little time left to do meaningful things together.

But I suppose it is only human to experience emotions. Just a problem of how much or how often such emotions are triggered. Perhaps the problem is that my expectations are too high oftentimes. Expectations of myself, of people around me, and of the society at large. High expectations lead to disappointment and exasperation when there is failure in meeting expectations. Then it leads to frustration and unhappiness, manifested as anger/sadness at myself and others.

There is no way to objectively measure how high or low expectations are, but I guess I am somewhat of a perfectionist. I think it used to be worse. I used to have such lofty expectations that almost always I get disappointed for some reason. Nowadays I am more down to earth, but still, the perfectionist mentality is there in most things that I or other people do. Having expectations about actions or achievements is one thing, having expectations about who/what I am or other people are is probably the worst thing, since it’s much more difficult, or sometimes even impossible to change or improve such things (e.g. the fact that I have family history of cancer and thus have much higher risk of getting cancer too, unfortunately, cannot be changed).

I suppose the only way then, is to manage one’s expectations of self and of others. How do you teach a perfectionist to stop being a perfectionist? Should I see a psychiatrist and pop some pills, go for psychotherapy to do some cognitive restructuring, or learn from religion? Which one of these can give permanent results? Will I end up becoming an under-achiever when I successfully kicked my perfectionist attitudes?