Happiness, On Being a GYPSY, and Managing Expectations

I discovered several months ago that I am a card-carrying GYPSY with flowering lawns and prancing unicorns. [More about GYPSYs – Generation Y Protagonists and Special Yuppies – and our “issues”.]

Apparently, what’s wrong with my generation is that our expectations are out of line with our reality. In short, we were raised by our Baby Boomer parents (who, in turn, were raised by their Greatest-Generation-Survivors-of-The-Great-Depression Parents) to expect that each generation would surpass the previous in terms of career success, wealth, and general happiness. Also, we were raised to believe that we are each unique, special, and that if you just work hard enough, you will be the star in your own success story from a very early age. Then, these GYPSYs meet with the reality of adult life in a post-9/11, post-Economic downturn of 2008 world. Suddenly, many of the things these GYPSYs had as core beliefs about the world, money, and happiness were upended, resulting in a lot of melancholy folks in their early 30s. And then, to put the shining cherry on top, GYPSYs watch one another live their lives on social media where there is a tendency to portray only what is good in your life, making everyone look disproportionately happy.

Forgetting about the sociological nuances of the GYPSYs, this all makes perfect sense. In some ways, Happiness = Expectations – Reality. If you set the expectations bar in a realistic place, chances are, reality will meet your expectations and you might be very content with your lot. Set the bar too high, and you might struggle to find contentment. Set the bar too low and you might grow lazy or complacent. It seems like this formula for happiness is about having the self-knowledge to lay out appropriate challenges for ones’ self, something I think about in terms of Flow.

Sometimes we can set our own bar to maximize our happiness: just high enough for a good challenge, but not too high as to be unattainable. Others of us are constantly pushing that bar higher and higher, and working harder and harder to reach it because whatever that bar is seems to really. just. matter. a lot.

An example of this that I’m working on right now is the program we hope to pilot, The Family Experiential School. I blogged about it in May (Pancakes). On the one hand, I set the bar low beginning with just kindergarteners to pilot our program. On the other hand, the model of the FES really pushes how the synagogue functions very far, very fast. It seems to me that we set a very high bar for a very small group of people, taking the relatively small group of TBE kindergarten families and placing the burden of changing the shape of the synagogue squarely on their shoulders. To me, that sounds very exciting; for many of them, it’s not a leap they can take. Here we are, three weeks before Religious School starts and we have not met our enrollment goals. It seems likely that we will have to tell the enthusiastic families who have registered for the FES that we will not run the pilot this year. Those are a lot of managed expectations: my own, our Board’s, and those families who were excited to embark on a creative, whole-family synagogue program. This is all by way of saying, please register for kindergarten!

What does our Torah portion have to say about bar-setting and expectations this week? Well, Va’etchanan is a hot-bed of expectations. Contained in this week’s portion we have both the second-telling of the Ten Commandments and the Sh’ma and the first paragraph of the V’ahavta. These texts are filled with expectations set for us by our Tradition: Do not Murder; Do not Covet; Love the Lord your God with all your strength; Teach them to your children… As Reform Jews, some the expectations just make sense. The commandments are in line with our own moral compass: Of course I won’t murder, Of course I won’t steal. Others can be harder for us to deal with: What if I do find myself coveting? What if I do take God’s name in vain? What if I don’t really observe Shabbat?

As Reform Jews, I think many of us employ another critical element when we manage the expectations of our Tradition. Compassion. When dealing with areas of Jewish practice and growth, we always have compassion. We know that the bar is set very, very high for Jewish life: observe commandments, study, repair the world, pray, rest, love, eat all in a Jewish way. When we fall a little short of the bar that we and tradition together have set for each of us, we are compassionate and say, “I will do better next time” and “there is always next Shabbat.”

For GYPSYs, an ounce of compassion will go a long way. Maybe the world is very different from what we GenY/Millennials imagined as children and the world we dream will be for ourselves and those who come after us is still so far away, but if we labor with compassion for ourselves and our efforts, we will be OK. Maybe we should add compassion to the equation? Perhaps Happiness = Expectations – Reality + Compassion.

May we all focus on compassion. May we love ourselves for our hard work, knowing that after we recharge and reconnect each week on Shabbat, we can inch that bar just a little bit higher – if we want to – or set the bar lower if we have gone too far. May we be compassionate with our coworkers, whose own equations are often hidden from our view, yet we encounter them every day. May we be compassionate with our family members and friends as they each write their own balanced equation, as we strive for meaning, purpose, and happiness.

Cantor Mary Rebecca Thomas