What Gap?

Martin Varsavsky recently made an observation I can’t shake. It's a hypothetical: three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One earns $50,000 as a teacher. One earns $200,000 as a lawyer. One runs a venture fund. Different zip codes, different square footage, different schools. But here’s what actually happens: the kids are watching the same shows, they're dropping their sons at the same birthday parties, navigating the same anxieties about raising a decent human in a distracted world. The gap between the kids is smaller than the gap between what they have and what they think they should have.

That last part is the part we don’t talk about enough.

The desire for more is human nature. I am not exempt from it, and neither is anyone I know. But there’s a lever nobody really looks at: expectations management. The distance between what you have and what you want is not fixed. It is adjustable. And most of us are quietly adjusting it upward, every year, without ever deciding to.

We talk about this at our house a lot. Because I have watched children (mine included) who were provided a house, a car, and a lifestyle funded by our income come to feel they deserve it. Not because they are bad people. Because they were never given the chance to experience what happens when you earn something for yourself. We provided the thing and, without meaning to, also provided the belief that it's a baseline. And now the baseline is higher than what their own earning will build for some time.

The question I keep coming back to is: what are you modeling? Not what are you saying, not what values are on the wall. What do the people around you actually observe in your posture toward what you have? Are they watching someone who is genuinely grateful for the overlap, who notices the abundance inside the ordinary? Or are they watching someone whose eyes drift to the gap?

You can say “be grateful” every day of a child’s life. But if they see restlessness with what is, they’ll learn restlessness.

What are you modeling?