Can another person ruin your life?

Question

Another person can shatter your hopes. What if you had had no expectations at all?

If we have no expectations, is this a way to go to avoid disappointment?

Answer 1

Expectations are simply human. To have no expectations is not to fully live. Of course, let's hope that life provides ample opportunity for one to grow and learn as reflected in their increasingly mature and insightful expectations. Hopes can be shattered but we are resilent and we grow stronger with each of life's vagaries. Worse than being disappointed is to not have the opportunity to learn that we are stronger than our disappointments.

Answer 2

It is possible!  Very young people are not mature enough to differentiate between real and fake friends and they trust everyone.  Sometimes even close relatives also take advantage of this trust and can ruin a young life.  Not everyone is born with wisdom like 'no expectations no disappointments'.   That comes after years of experience and some hard-knocks...

Answer 3

In a weird world where nobody wanted anything. I guess nobody would be let down. But that'll never happen, unfortunatly.

Answer 4

The first answer seems to be that people can betray and destroy each other, if you care to believe just a fraction of the testimony of your own senses. What people can wrest from each other is hard to believe, but it's a fact that must be credited.

The severity of the shock is inversely proportional to the extent to which the wounded creature realizes that her primary relationship is with her Creator.

I have been urged by some Indian elders to relinquish all expectations in all undertakings, to ensure immunity from disappointment and heart-break. There is some homey wisdom there, but that can't be the whole story.

Was their intended advice that I should cynically keep back from commitment? That would be a bit inconsistent, if not paradoxical. The expectation of disappointment falls short of renouncing all expectations, and it is an unsafe vaccine against disappointment.

Lord Krshn expressed disdain for those who would rather withdraw from everything, and not 'put their shoulder to the wheel' -I'm sure those were His words. Nurturing a relationship counts.

Putting one's shoulder to the wheel nowadays is no meaner feat than it ever was, Internet and Y-A notwithstanding. The level of motivation required to get anything done -to make anything work, to even just hold together, to get the wheel to just budge- is very, very high. Very highly structured expectations unavoidably compose the motivation needed... to breathe.

Lord Krshn, and all of the Manifestations of God whose words and deeds are known, did teach a way to resolve the conflict between the need for the motivation to act, relate, love, and arise to fight for all the beleaguered Draupadis, and the need for preservation from the heart-break that must come from trusting the world and anything in it for even a moment.

This resolution occurs on a higher level than either need.

Lord Krshn taught detachment from the fruits of all action. Work, relationships, and the love between spouses and between parents and children, are motivated by the desire to promote and accelerate a process that may be fast or slow, but never reversed: the progress of the soul towards the Creator,  through the discovery in oneself of divine qualities.

The inferior, inadequate motivations for doing what we do leave us... wide open. What power you may be handing over to a fickle tyrant, when you love someone for that someone's sake!

It used to embarrass me to illness, the way Indians greet each other with that gesture, you know, as though addressing a prayer to each other. Hindus once all knew that humans possess latent  divine qualities, that God's image has been graven within each of us. The gesture probably once meant this, and the meaning is re-discovered all of the time.

Take the safe vaccine. Love your lover, for the bit of God your lover reflects. If you love your lover for your lover's sake, you will always be disappointed; our imperfections are endless, and they just accumulate.

If your calloused lover leaves you to yourself, the God you really loved in your lover will show Himself again.

Answer 5

Another person can ruin your life...only if you let them. It is natural as human beings to have expectations of others sometimes. The trick is detaching from those expectations. Then we feel blessed when they work out, and not devastated when they don't. Another person only has the power you give them. Sometimes the people who "failed" our expectations the most are the ones who have taught us the most about our own inner strength and resilence.

Answer 6

There are a few things at work in your question.  The first thing is whether someone else can truly ruin your life.  Depends on what you identify with.  If you identify with your work, your family, and so on, then yes.  Someone else can ruin your life in a major way.  If you identify with your virtues and good deeds, then all it takes is a single misdeed to ruin that self-image.  In terms of purely other-person-instigated ruin, there's a motto I learned from my wife: "people will only do to you what you allow them to do to you."  

Non-identification and having no expectations is no substitute for setting appropriate limits.  There are healthy, useful expectations and unhealthy ones.  For example: I work a standard 40 hour week.  At the end of my pay period, I expect to be paid for my time.  This is a healthy expectation.  I expect to have time off as I agreed with my employer: also a healthy expectation.  I expect to be the executive director of this department over the next five years...not so healthy.  Especially if I stake my reputation and self-worth on it.

You can avoid disappointment my not having any expectations, but I think that's a little too extreme. Pick and choose the expecations that are warranted and healthy.  This way, you can continue to function in the world, have appropriate boundaries, and at the same time, not identifying with them enables you to exercise your options in working with disappointment when it arises.

Answer 7

I think that you are right.; But in some ways it is boring. If you dont have any expectations, then this person ruins your life, it is boring, becasue you not expeted it.