Welcome to the Roundabout
Here's a behavior I repeat constantly, and I'd bet you do too: expecting people to act differently than they do. Expecting things, or the world, to go the way we want them to. It feels like the most reasonable thing to want. It's actually about the least realistic view of the world available to us.
We are what we repeatedly do, and this is one of the quieter versions of that — it doesn't look like a behavior, just an assumption sitting underneath everything else. We keep doing it because we're operating without intention, and without a realistic view of the world. I've been circling back to this one, with mixed results, for about twenty years.
Here's where it shows up regularly for me. There's a roundabout about two minutes from my house, the first real intersection on my way into Boulder. Some people flow through it like it's nothing. Others treat it like a four-way stop and won't merge without a three-car-length gap, which, respectfully, defeats the entire purpose of a roundabout. I can leave my driveway seemingly chill and be ridiculously aggravate at the first minivan with a baby on board sticker ninety seconds later.
There's a well-known entry in Marcus Aurelius's private journal — Meditations — where he reminds himself, every morning, that the day ahead will be full of difficult people: the manipulators, the ingrates, the ones who'll test his patience before lunch. He wasn't hoping for a smooth day and setting himself up to be disappointed. He was starting from the world as it actually is instead of the version he'd prefer — friction is the nature of the thing, not an exception to it. Marcus was the Emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in his world, and even he couldn't expect people to fall in line with what he wanted. If he couldn't expect that, I've got no case for expecting it either. Anticipate the common friction and you get to respond to it, instead of just reacting to the gap between what happened and what you wanted to happen. Planet Earth - where other people live. That was true even for him.
We can all better anticipate what our day holds with this perspective — running through the moments that are going to test you, before they test you, while you're still calm enough to think straight. Not to dodge the discomfort. To meet it with a plan instead of an unproductive reaction.
This matters because of the two things foundational to resilience and flourishing: agency and mental agility. Agency is having some control over your response, even when you have none over the trigger. Mental agility is finding a different angle on a situation instead of getting stuck on the first, least useful, interpretation or reaction. Prehearsing trains both at once — because you can't build a better response in the middle of the moment. You build it in advance, in moments when nothing's testing you yet.
Years ago, my partner on the ambulance was Chris Walsh — good dude and solid medic seemed unbothered by pretty much anything that came over the radio. One night we got toned out of bed around 12:30, which for me is the worst possible window to be woken up. We're pulling out of the station and in my head I'm mid-profanity-laden tirade about people who call 911 for things that clearly aren't emergencies, which, candidly, describes most calls. I looked over at Chris. Completely calm. I asked him — don't people drive you insane?
He said something like: yeah, at times, but the world would be a pretty boring place without them.
That actually did was burst an illusion I hadn’t examined — that the callers, or the world in general, owed me a shift that unfolded the way I wanted it to. They didn't know that was the deal. They didn't care. Not because they were cruel — because my expectations were never their problem to manage. None of it was personal.
More than twenty years later, that line still runs through my head. It didn't change the call. It changed how I showed up for it. Full disclosure — I still don't reach for that reframe as often as I'd like, on days when I'm not running on intent but distracted by a thousand other things, if I'm honest. But it's back, top of mind now and will be this week, as I write this note before I send it out Friday, and for a while after.
Back to the roundabout. On the days I remember it's coming — when I've already told myself, there's a roundabout up ahead, and there are people out there living entirely different lives, with different attention spans and different Tuesdays than mine — I get through it clean. Same intersection. Same drivers. Different me, because I anticipated it. Same move as Marcus, first thing in the morning. Same lesson Chris gave me on a call twenty years ago: it was never going to go my way, and it was never about me.
So here's the assignment, mine as much as yours: name the parts of your day that reliably test your equanimity. Write them down. Picture yourself moving through them differently — not perfectly, just differently.
If it's something you can actually change, change it. If it's outside your control — traffic, weather, other people's driving — the only lever left is your own expectations walking in. This is exactly where the plan-act-reflect loop from last week's letter comes back around. Pick your friction point. Plan a different response before you're in it. Act it out when the moment comes. Reflect on what actually happened. Start anywhere in that circle — it still works.
Corny as it sounds, this is the whole game. Not some giant leap forward — those don't really exist. It's the small, repeated, unglamorous stuff. How you spend your minutes is how you spend your hours, your days, your weeks — your life.
—Ben
