End of the semester, end of the year.

If there was one thing that rings non-stop throughout this semester of education, it is the idea of "self-fulfilling prophecies."

In life, many of times, to cope challenges that life throws us again and again, we learn, through suffering and experience that sometimes, it is just better to anticipate the future, and hence do something against it today, before it hits us tomorrow.

While it makes perfect sense and only seem like a sensible thing to do, expectations have a major loophole. How would you know your expectation is the perfect/correct one? The truth is, no one knows, and the best we could do is make educated guesses. How reliable is betting your future on educated guesses? Apparently enough for most of us to do it regardless.

In fact, the damage is does is probably more than most of us are aware of. At least I dare say I was pretty guilty to the consequences. For example, expectations can cause stable markets, banks to crash in a matter of a few weeks or months. Just because of unfounded rumors or wrongly interpreted facts. That simple, one person says the wrong thing, a thousand people believes and takes action, a million sees interprets it as the beginnings of the prophecy, the whole market crashes.

Was the market even in trouble in the first place? Probably no. Is it, after just a simple rumor/misinterpretation? Yes, and in fact in a world of hurt. (We assume no government has intervened to save it.) Hasn't that then become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

If only it stopped there. A common problem people with depression or anti-social tendencies is the act of rumination, or the repetitive reflection or thinking of the same worries and facts. A person with depression might over-think his circumstances so badly that what seemed to be a manageable situation could be imagined into one that he/she has no hope of ever solving. They expect much more problems to pop-up and give up due to the possible additional complications instead of just simply solving the problem in front of them right there and then. Further depression then develops and the problem does indeed become unsolvable. Kudos to them seeing it coming?

In a way, people with anti-social tendencies are worse. They seem to interpret every single bad interaction with people as a sign that they're bad at interacting with people. They expect people to dislike them and shun away even though what they might have really needed was just some normal interaction to "restore their faith in humanity".

Expectations, self-fulfilling prophecies. Complicating what could have been a simple problem to a big complicated, incomprehensible one.

Sometimes, things in life just aren't as complicated as it seems. We just need to take things in stride and solve things that come our away, one boring brick at a time. While learning how to anticipate change and stay relevant is undoubtedly good, perhaps we should consider how we would never know whether our anticipation is true and hence should always leave some leeway for better judgement.

Should we ignore someone just because we think he/she is a bad person? Such stigmatization only leads to...

Yep you guessed it, "self-fulfilling prophecies".

Hostility breeds hostility. Misunderstandings cause more misunderstandings. How could we tread through this maze of life and attempt to remain sane I really have no idea. But since we're already in this cycle, why don't we trust what has been equipped to us, passed down from our ancestors, and pray we could do it, just like they could, which is how we came to exist in the first place?