The Quest for Constant Awe

It was May 2019. The blistering sun was magnifying through my car windshield, burning the bottom half of my face and knuckles and tanning out my forearms. Beads of sweat ran down the sides of my head, cutting their way through dirt, dust, and dried salt from the previous day’s perspiration. The little dial for controlling air temperature in my car was twisted all the way to icy-cold. Yet all that poured out was a lukewarm, musky draft. The engine was idling, and I imagined how hot it must be between the gears and cogs rotating at high speed beneath the hood. Rubber belts, greased machinery, all mashed together and forced to operate under sweltering conditions.

Beyond the chassis of my car, there was a whole lot of nothing. Sage brush dotted the sandy surface of the southern Nevada/California desert, with the occasional tumbleweed to add to the greater sense of extinction. It was immensely dry, with the only drops of liquid in a fifty-mile radius being those that formed on my lower back and ran down into my ass. I was concocting a little oasis of my own, and not at all proud of it.

The tips of my ears were stained crimson—not from the beating sun, but from my frustration and confused, misguided anger. I was on what was supposed to be a wild, adventurous road trip through western America. What was supposed to be an escapade of learning, cultural growth, and complete independence. What was supposed to be filled with picturesque sunrises and campfires surrounded by welcoming strangers. All I’d done is stare at mounds of sand, sweat through most of the wardrobe I’d brought, and I hadn’t spoken to anyone in several days.

I used to follow a lot of different travel accounts on Instagram. Primarily, accounts that relayed brilliant photos of ocean beaches or magnificent mountain ranges. Many of the pictures were taken from inside a van, its back doors swung wide open with the photographers legs and feet dangling happily out over the rear bumper. The edges of the vans framed these breath-taking vistas, daring onlooking app-scrollers to follow suit. Leave behind all your material goods, join the digital nomadic age, drive to some remote place and let the land speak to your soul. The pictures were amazing. There was no way anyone could do that, be there with those views, and not be forever changed. I craved that adventure, the perfect freedom.

So after I graduated in 2019 from Utah State University, my degree in Psychology in tow, I packed up my car and left. I had transformed the back half of my little Volkswagen Jetta into a sort of tent-on-wheels, removing the seats and constructing a platform that would allow me to lay down flat at full body length. From there I added space for water jugs, crates for supplies and food, and a cooler to keep my perishables cold. It was clever, and I was ready to one-up all those #vanlife posters, downgrading to a car rather than a big, self-constructed van set up. I was excited to be out on a new frontier, where the only schedule was my own. There was something for me to learn out there, I could feel it. Especially in the days leading up to my college graduation and subsequent exit from the place I had called home for nearly 21 years.

It was going to be magical.

I was waist-deep into my trek, pissed off, sweaty, about ready to punch through a tree—if only I could find one. I was so discontent I think I actually believed I might have enough anger-fueled strength to get my fist through the tree-trunk, rather than shatter my burnt knuckles on the bark.

I expected to exist in a constant state of awe while journeying through the west. Always have plenty of energy to tackle and climb the best hikes, rise up to the best and most perfect ridgelines. Yet in the first week I had forgotten that all my laundry would need to be done in laundromats, and I had no soap or quarters. Every bathroom break was torturous, as I searched for gas stations that would let me piss without having to buy something. I was soaked in a never-ending wave of sweat. Gripped by fears of police or meth-heads banging on my car windows. I could smell my own pits and taint more often than I cared to admit. I was bound to my car or the outside air, since my dog couldn’t parade into the public library. I was bored beyond belief. I spent countless hours staring straight through sand, mountain ranges, hills, and buildings. Nothing about my “magical journey” had been what I expected it to be.

And that discrepancy—between what I thought would happen, how I thought I’d feel, and what was actually happening, what I actually felt—was maddening.

Endless desert (Photo taken by the author)

The circumstances I was in weren’t inherently bad or distasteful. Being bound to the outside can bring with it a huge desire to explore the natural world. Camp, hike, fish, bushcraft, meditate, journal, and so on. All things that I would eventually start doing with some regularity as my trip went on. Washing clothes at a laundromat isn’t terrible—for a large portion of the population, that’s the only way they can get their linens clean. A police officer knocking on my car window in the middle of the night and asking me to move wasn’t all that scary, once it finally occurred. Smelling like the underside of a donkey’s ass is only bad if you let it get to that point—wherein many KOAs, YMCAs, truck stops, and rec centers have showers available for a small fee.

I had taken to the road with the expectation that everything would run smoothly, it would all go according to plan. And when it inevitably didn’t, I was upset. Why can’t my life be like the ones who post those Instagram photos? Why is there so much that I have to run into and learn the hard way? I was lucky to have one of those “picturesque” moments—van-framed, clear and inspiring, motivated and unforgettable—once a week, if that. But I was supposed to live in those moments every day, all the time. Those moments were supposed to be my bread-and-butter.

Our expectations of the world around us directly correlate to the emotions and feelings we express. This is something that both works for us and against us, as human beings. It’s easy to hear the case I’ve detailed above and think, “Well, Christian, just don’t have any expectations. Live life fully in the present and that solves the problem.” But this method of living often leads us to repeat the careless mistakes of our past. To use an elementary example: if I burn my hand on the stove, I might be hesitant to place it there in the future—whether the stove is on or not. It isn’t simply that I have equated ‘stove’ to ‘burn’. I’ve constructed an emotional, and in this case physical, reaction to the event. If the initial burn was bad enough, I might even retain some traumatic memories from that injury, and those will especially charge my expectations of what stoves do to people’s hands.

If I were to dedicate myself fully to the present, I fail to learn from the circumstances of my past. I might continue burning my hand over and over because I refuse to understand that an expectation in the function of a stove is actually there for my own good. In effect, some expectations are built into the human psyche and played out in our behavior as survival mechanics. It didn’t take too many curious people being mauled by lions or dying from poisonous mushrooms for us to acquire some expectations about how to approach wild animals and edible fungi. This lesson can be applied to a myriad of implements throughout history.

But what about how expectations impact our emotions and mental states? Clearly there are hard-wired reasons for their consequences in physical safety. The evidence is not so clear when we apply expectations to something like the pursuit of happiness.

In the case of my road trip, I spent countless evenings thumbing my way through the van life fantasy. I never realized that the sheer amount of content I was intaking, and what that content was portraying, was meticulously constructing an entire perspective on how road-tripping was supposed to go. Van-lifers don’t take photos of the sweat in their ass-crack, the sand in their socks, or the yellow in their eyes because they have to pee so bad and can’t find a bathroom. That’s all the ugly stuff, the stuff that isn’t romantic, energizing, or fun. Problem is, that ugly stuff is what makes up most of your life. If 5% of your time is spent looking through the van-framed rear window at the majesty of the Teton Mountains, the other 95% is spent just trying to get there.

This equation begs the question: is expecting those numbers to be any different the crux of what leads to a dissatisfaction with life? Therein resulting in anxiety, depression, discontent, restlessness, shame, and anger? Could mismanaged expectations be a root cause for many of our emotional and mental health-related bumps in the road?

Today the world is constantly all around us. We can peruse through thousands of videos, pictures, and Twitter posts from every corner of the globe. Just in one hour. Many people do their social surfing for a lot long than that. We’re all growing to be global citizens—more connected than we’ve ever been before. What is that doing to our expectations, and do we even notice a change taking place?

We see the one-in-a-million who goes viral. We watch the five-year-overnight-successes and perfectly edited photo-moments from a long list of social media friends. But we’re left feeling vacant, mismatched to the brilliance and bombastic living dancing across our screens every night. We expect to live in awe, and when 95% of our life is grinding, grueling, challenging torment, we feel short-changed by online comparison. We expect a marvelous life, all of the time. When we don’t get what we want, we live 100% of our time in despair.

What’s the solution? How do you manage your expectations so you learn to love the average moments? Many rich folks say with confidence that they thought they’d be happy once they made their money. Thought they’d finally achieve some pinnacle of human actualization, where they’d ultimately be exempt from the expectation game. Everlasting happiness and celebrity, joy and peace. Those same rich folks also say that isn’t the crack. The game never ends, not till you draw your final breath. They say, in some cases, it only gets harder. Which from an experiential standpoint, makes perfect sense. A lifetime of moments builds up on the brain, teaching you one year at a time what to expect, or not expect, from everything. A new born baby looks at everything in awe, because it is in awe—everything is new and there’s nothing to expect.

How do we deal with all this expectant plaque, congealed on our minds, guiding our movements, thoughts, and emotions?

I don’t have an answer for that.

Only clues to the greatest question. If I knew the way through that inquiry, had a little one-size-fits-all pill that solved that ever-pressing problem, I’d be a ‘rich folk’ myself. One thing I do know: being aware of what’s causing the problem is always the first step. In moments of frustration, guilt, shame, and anger, pause and ask yourself—what did I expect to happen? Are my circumstances inherently bad, or am I just emotional because I expected something else? Often enough, the answer to that question will start breaking down an evocative initial response, brick by brick.

My road trip went on, and I started adapting to a mobile life filled with daily problem solving. I never reached apex road travel expertise, I doubt I ever will. My journey was filled with moments of discontent, most of which were fueled by how I thought things should be going. I felt at odds with myself—trying to throw away the worthless self hatred while holding on to the ambition to create a better life. After all, my thoughts about how things should be going helped drive me to try new things, meet new people, and give credence and time to the passions in my life.

I was forced to balance the scales of self trash-talk with unsatisfied circumstance. If I chose to feed the truly negative words I said to myself, I’d still be sitting in the middle of nowhere, looking at nothing, hating every minute. By using appropriate expectations, I set goals for myself, pushed myself, and found a new me on the other side. A new me that was more myself than the old, complacent, idle version. I looked deeply at what I wanted out of life, and considered one simple question:

If I keep doing what I’m doing, what is really going to happen?