parv bhadra

On Expectation Alignment (and Modern Vietnam)

skip to Vietnam vietnam Expectations are a curious construct. They exist somewhere in the liminal space between perception and desire—a mental model we impose on the world, often without its consent. At their best, they function as guiding stars, steering efforts and framing aspirations. At their worst, they are the miscalibrated inputs to a system doomed to oscillate wildly, perpetually missing its steady state.

Misalignment, then, is the natural order of things. A signal-to-noise ratio issue, if you will. They are seldom grounded in the hard reality of what is. Instead, they are engineered artifacts of what we think should be. This disparity becomes obvious in domains where the stakes are high: engineering projects that spiral into chaos, relationships that corrode under the pressure of unmet ideals, or even the simple frustration of discovering your coffee isn’t as hot as you expected. These examples differ in scope, but the mechanics are eerily similar.

From a systems perspective, misalignment of expectations is essentially a feedback problem. The model fails to update when reality deviates. Why? Because humans are stubbornly prone to overfitting. We lock onto specific variables, extrapolate wildly, and ignore the probabilistic fuzziness of life. The result? Overshoot. Instability. Collapse.

Misalignment introduces tension: a schism between what is actual and what is desired. Nietzsche might have called it the eternal recurrence of disappointment. Sartre, meanwhile, would probably shrug and mutter something about the absurdity of trying to impose meaning on a meaningless world. Regardless of the framing, the outcome is universal: frustration. A lingering sense that the cosmos is, at best, indifferent to our expectations and, at worst, actively antagonistic.

And yet, expectations persist. Humans are narrative creatures, and expectations provide the scaffolding for the stories we tell ourselves. Without them, there’s nothing to measure, nothing to strive for, nothing to hold onto. The issue arises when those narratives clash—internally or externally. Two engineers with opposing interpretations of a project timeline. A manager whose vision of productivity doesn’t align with the limitations of physics. A parent whose expectations of their child are written with a pen wielded by ego rather than understanding.

The misalignment becomes self-perpetuating, spiraling into dysfunction. The frustrated manager pushes harder, reinforcing inefficiencies. The disappointed parent doubles down, widening the rift. The misaligned engineers spend more time arguing over scope than building the damn thing. The cycle continues until someone - perhaps begrudgingly - updates the model.

But even that process is fraught. Updating expectations requires admitting they were flawed in the first place, which is anathema to most people. The sunk-cost fallacy rears its head, and pride gets in the way of recalibration. In technical terms, the system remains in a suboptimal local minimum because climbing out feels like losing ground, even if it’s ultimately in the right direction.

And let’s not pretend alignment is a permanent state. Even when achieved, it’s a fleeting victory. Context shifts, variables mutate, and yesterday’s calibration is today’s misstep. Like entropy, misalignment is inevitable. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a state of dynamic equilibrium—a system where the feedback loops are tight enough to prevent runaway instability but loose enough to allow for the occasional detour.

Vietnam

This problem is quite vivid in Vietnam. Officially, it’s a socialist state, but walk through Ho Chi Minh City’s chaotic motorbike-clogged streets and you’ll see capitalism screaming from every neon sign. The government extols "state-directed development," while the streets tell you the market directs itself just fine, thank you very much.

The historical north-south divide in Vietnam adds another layer of complexity to this game of misaligned expectations. The North, shaped by decades of centralized planning and war-time resilience, still leans toward collectivist ideals. Its institutions emphasize discipline, long-term vision, and a rather stoic approach to ambition. In the South, especially in Ho Chi Minh City, it’s all hustle. The city thrives on rapid adaptation and capitalist pragmatism — a lingering influence of its pre-1975 days as a commercial hub under American-backed capitalism.

People don’t just wake up one day with a worldview; it’s constructed through history, culture, incentives, and even geography. The gap between what one side values and what the other side assumes they value is often unspoken but deeply entrenched. After the war, when the North unified the country under a socialist regime, Saigon’s capitalist underpinnings didn’t vanish - they went underground, waiting for the reforms of Đổi Mới (Vietnam’s economic liberalization in the 1980s) to resurface with a vengeance.

What struck me most in this week of observations is how Saigon and maybe the South as a whole seems to thrive in contradiction. It’s a city deeply aware of its past but unburdened by it. The scars of war are acknowledged but not dwelled upon. The museums may tell a story of unification struggle, but the locals I met are living a narrative of opportunity and reinvention.

In the end, alignment of expectations is less a problem to solve and more a reality to negotiate. It’s a dance between competing forces: precision and adaptability, ambition and humility, the treasure map and the terrain. To expect otherwise is, ironically, just another misaligned expectation.