Dunking in Kaveri

Dunking in Kaveri

Is gratification inversely related to expectation?

What I mean is ‘Does it give you more pleasure if you accomplished something that was not mandatory / routine for you to do?'  Let me explain.

An incident that fortified this view was to do with some volunteering work I and my husband are involved in – on different causes and in different environments.  In the last few weeks, our  conversations revolve a lot around this and I somehow get a feeling that we both will put this experience in the category of most rewarding things in our life.  The joy is different and the satisfaction is more internal. Not much would be amiss in the world around us if we were not involved in this exercise and nobody would have missed us or in other words, there was no expectation.  But it made a difference to us and brought huge self gratification. This is probably the reason why we see lot of volunteering these days, many of them anonymous too.  It is a great trend and if this kind of gratification is a reason for this, I am not complaining!  

I had another experience with ‘low expectation – high gratification’ too. A few months back one of my articles got published in a newspaper.  While I rejoiced a lot and was gratified, I did not expect anything more to come out of it.  Then I received a payment for the article – not substantial but a round figure!  Ah, I was bowled over so much so that my husband was puzzled with my repeated reference to it, and even mentioned that I have not bothered so much with my salaries and increments and bonuses in my career! But it was different, you see.  I did something out of my way – I am not a journalist, am not a writer and I got rewarded materially for it too.  My expectation was zero and my gratification was very high when I was rewarded.

Which prompts me to say ít is more gratifying to do things that are not expected’ and ‘even more gratifying to be rewarded when one does not expect it at all’.