Social Expectations: When You’re Not Digging The Script

June 20th 2017.  It seems like just yesterday.  Admittedly, I was waiting for that day for just over a year, maybe a bit longer, depending on how you want to count.  It was my last day at work before relocating to start my PhD program.  Indeed, a highly anticipated moment.  Even so, I still found myself wrestling at times leading up to that day.  “Wrestling with what?”, you may ask.  Expectations.  Social expectations, to be more specific.

Social expectations are a strange phenomenon.  They aren’t explicitly linked to human instinct (like self-preservation or reproduction).  They’ll never be included in the terms and conditions of a service agreement (not that we read them anyway).  They’ll never appear in a job description or written offer of employment.  They’ll differ based on age, race, gender, sexual orientation, income, culture, and nationality, just to name a few variables.  A persistent, pervasive pressure and expectation to conform to certain patterns of behavior, informed by what’s gathered about us through social interactions.  An unwritten script that tells us what we’re supposed to do in various context.  Social expectations.  I have them.  And you have them, too.

April 2014, I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh (Go Pitt!; #H2P).  I was in the top 2% of my graduating class.  It goes without saying that I had expectations for myself, academically and professionally.  Without a doubt.  As I progressed through my program, I became more aware of the expectations that my classmates had for me as well.  4 years is a long time, after all, and by the time graduation rolls around, you can’t help but assume those students you hold in high esteem will land the very “best” opportunities.  I’m not innocent of this either.  “Why are you going to work THERE?”, I would think to myself when I learned about offers some of my classmates had accepted.  It’s an unwritten social script: it tells you what to expect of various individuals in different context.  And when we deviate from that script, eyebrows instinctively raise.

Fast forward a year after graduation, and I was 8 months in with the consulting firm I was working for at the time.  In fact, I had just received a promotion, but nevermind that.  Although by that point I had already more or less made up my mind about pursuing a career in academia, I was thinking through where I would be down the road if I stayed on my current career path, with my current employer or elsewhere.  The picture wasn’t promising but not for the reasons you may be thinking.  I was positioned for really amazing opportunities, but I wasn’t digging the script. The problem was rather simple: I could change industries, change companies, change positions, etc., but if I continued to accept (and get recruited for) positions similar to the one I held, the work environment wouldn’t be favorable and I would have [an unusually high level of] difficulty pursuing many of my interest outside of work (that’s the very short of it).  Interestingly, even though that was the circumstance, social expectations would call me to continue to choose exactly that: positions similar to the one I had.  Why?  Because they’re part of the script.  Those would be the positions with similar pay, prestige, influence/power/responsibility, and whatever else you may feel inclined to put in that bucket.  That’s what social expectations do though.  They restrict behavior, limiting choices to alternatives that are deemed as acceptable for the context.  I started my PhD earlier this month though, so I clearly took a different route.

I don’t want to paint a picture that social expectations are unique to me or some type of new idea.  In fact, in many ways, my situation was trivial compared to more insidious ones.  Insidious (adjective): proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.  Indeed, that’s the PERFECT description.  In some ways, I’d liken social expectations to the 2016 Presidential Election (this won’t get political, I promise).  For the informed voter, you knew there were 4 (major) presidential candidates for the 2016 election.  For the uninformed voter, you may have been under the impression there were only 2.  How’d that happen?  Well, although there were several choices, we were primarily presented with only 2 of them (Those were the 2 I followed the most, if you were wondering).  So much in fact that if you weren’t following closely, you may have believed there were only 2 options to start with!  In a similar way, social expectations call for us to make life decisions based on a script for our lives, saying, “choose from these options!”  The irony is the alternatives we’re “expected” to choose from don’t constitute our full spectrum of options.  But they do represent the options that go with the script.  The crazy thing is so many proceed through their entire lives not realizing there are options available to them, beyond the ones they’re ‘expected’ to choose from.  Yes, I would use insidious to describe social expectations.

Given the focus areas of the blog though, it’s only fitting I highlight social expectations in the context of work, at least for this post.  I was following a discussion on LinkedIn the other day.  To paraphrase, the question of the original poster was along the lines of whether or not you’d take a job scooping poop if it meant 3 times your current pay and 1/3 your current workload.  There’s a lot we can unpack in his question, and we’ll revisit this question again over the next few posts.  Although this question seems completely ludicrous and trivial, this question, and ones like it, are actually pretty central to this blog. Would you feel better going to that happy hour and telling people you shovel poop for a living, knowing you tripled your income?  Are your feelings about shoveling poop influenced at all by whether or not people know you tripled your income by agreeing to do so?  Is work just a means to an end or do we see it as an extension/manifestation of part of our identity?  Is one better or worse than the other?  And how does the color of your skin and/or your faith come into all of this?  Do these influence your interest (or lack thereof) in shoveling poop, tripling your income and the amount of time you have available for non-work pursuits? Questions that seriously need answers.  The Prologue.

Nnamdi