Having found what felt like the first deal in a regular shop in months, I ordered some Pokémon card packs to open for fun. It was a Thursday. Shops are busy these days, so I didn’t expect them to arrive until after the weekend. That was totally fine.
On Friday morning, I saw an email in my inbox: Your order will arrive today. Whoa! Really? How did they turn that around so fast? I was happy, of course. Maybe I’d get to open some boosters that very weekend after all.
I checked the package tracking. “A little over 20 stops before your delivery,” it said. Okay, cool. Parcels usually arrived only in the afternoon anyway. I decided I would finish work whenever the cards arrived, open a handful, then get ready. My partner were to eat dinner at a friend’s house.
When I checked again in the afternoon, the tracking had barely moved. “A little over 10 stops before your delivery.” Ack. Okay, that’s fine. I had something to finish at work regardless. But soon, we were nearing 5 PM, and still no parcel in sight. My plan began to crumble.
Eventually, I switched to doing some writing, and, at around 7 PM, we had to get ready. By that point, I knew where my package was going: nowhere. Sometimes, the delivery man’s truck is so full, he can’t get to everything. They just roll the delivery to the next day, of course. And at 8:30 PM, after we had already left the house, I got the message: “Sorry. We couldn’t deliver your parcel today.”
That notification, however, came with a twist: “We’ll try again on the next working day.” I had a mini heart attack. Monday!? Why not tomorrow? But I realized I didn’t know if they counted Saturdays or not, and, in any case, packages usually arrived, and mine was already on the truck. So, most likely, it would arrive the next day.
On Saturday morning, I adjusted my plan. I’d start my day, do some chores and some work, then open some cards in the afternoon. I checked the tracking, and, around 10 AM, there were already only 10 deliveries ahead of mine. I could see the car being in our neighborhood on the map.
I cooked breakfast, did laundry, and freed some glasses of their limescale stains. Around 1 PM, I figured the cards should arrive soon. Maybe I could wait, open some, then get to work? I reloaded the tracking page and…”live updates are currently not available.” Gaaaah!
That brings us to right now. It’s 3:30 PM. I have no clue where my cards are. I don’t know if they’ll arrive today. If not, it’ll be Monday at the earliest—and Monday was what I had originally expected all along.
Sometimes, I wonder: Is all this real-time information we receive nowadays really helping? Or does it actually make our lives harder? I remember ordering CDs from Finland in the early 2000s. I had no idea when they would arrive. It usually took weeks. But for all those weeks, I was looking forward to a new album from my favorite band. Nowadays, those weeks would probably be spent fretting about timelines, handovers at the border, and whether the delivery would ultimately happen before a weekend or not.
The more updates you get on the status of an event, the more you adjust your expectations. News jump from neutral to positive to negative and back again. Every time, you spend thoughts, emotions, and energy integrating the latest update into your plans. Meanwhile, if you had started with low expectations and maintained them, you could have ignored all the news and saved those finite commodities.
If the outcome is determined and not critical—like a parcel with a new toy eventually arriving—don’t get sucked into the social media version of an event. Not everything needs to happen through a feed you can refresh and follow. Set off with low—or no—expectations, and maintain them. You’ve got more important plans to work on, and whatever’s on its way to you can wait as well as you do.
