When disappointment strikes, is your instinct to try to shake it off, forget about it and move on? My research and experience of many workplaces suggests this might be exactly the wrong response.

My interest in the science of disappointment began more than 15 years ago as a workplace consultant. I was struck by how often clients described episodes that left them feeling disappointed as deeply personal and unsettling experiences – and by how little research there was to help me respond meaningfully. That prompted me to do a PhD on the subject.

Disappointment often reflects a gap between expectation and reality. It can involve grieving a future we had already begun to live in our minds.

My subsequent research with colleagues revealed a telling pattern. In the workplace, disappointment is frequently generated at a systemic level by unrealistic targets – yet lands on individuals as a sense of personal failure.

In many walks of life, it is commonly dismissed as an unwanted and unhelpful emotion. But our research tells a different story. Disappointment can be an important fuel for creativity. It surfaces what we truly desire, clarifies what matters to us, and points us toward what we are not yet willing to accept.

Whether in our professional or personal lives, disappointment is a signal worth learning to read. Here are some ideas for when you next come up against it.

1. Don’t get ahead of yourself

When we are waiting on a significant decision – a job offer, test result or relationship turning point – our emotional response is prepared long before the answer arrives. The same outcome can feel entirely different depending on what we anticipated would happen. The wider the gap between expectation and reality, the greater the disappointment.

In the workplace, severe disappointment in not getting a job or missing out on a promotion can stem from the loss of a working future we had already begun to imagine. If that future does not materialise, we grieve it – even if it never fully existed.

2. Beware the success trap

Success can quietly raise the bar for future failure. One of our respondents illustrated this dynamic neatly. Exceed your work target by 10% one year, they observed, and your manager is unlikely to reward you with a lighter load the next. Rather, the target is raised again, making falling short more likely – and the disappointment more acute because of your past success.

The same pattern can play out in social situations. Think of a friend who often picks up the bill. Over time, a generous gesture becomes expected behaviour. Then, on the one occasion they don’t pay, this becomes a moment of disappointment that people notice and remember. That disappointment is not proportionate to what actually happened, but to the gap with what was expected.

3. Try not to blame yourself (or anyone else)

People rarely experience disappointment in a neutral way. Rather, they tend to interpret it through one of two familiar patterns.

The first is internal: “I am the problem.” This assumes they did not try hard enough or were simply not good enough. Disappointment is treated as a sign they are a flawed or bad person.

The second interpretation is external. The fault is with others who did not recognise the person’s value and did not live up to expectations. The instinct is to blame and get angry with them.

Our research on disappointment in organisations shows both responses miss the point. Blaming ourselves or others can be a way of avoiding something harder to confront: that expectations are unrealistic or based on inaccurate assumptions.

4. The Ikea effect

Environments shape expectations. In workplaces, many people are encouraged to aim high and improve continuously. Organisations often promote ideals of progress, achievement and fulfilment.

These ideals can be motivating, but they can also create a perfect scenario that reality struggles to match. From this perspective, disappointment can be a structural feature of systems that rely on high expectations and idealised outcomes.

But there’s a personal aspect too. Research on what psychologists call “the Ikea effect” shows the more effort we invest in something, the more we value it – rather like a flatpack piece of furniture that we have built ourselves. At work, we routinely pour time, energy and identity into projects, roles and relationships. So, when things don’t go as hoped, we are losing something very personal.

And because failure at work is often witnessed by colleagues and managers, the stakes feel higher. The loss can become entangled with how others see us, and how we see ourselves.

Left unexamined, such feelings can calcify into something more damaging than the original disappointment: a diminished appetite for risk, a reluctance to invest fully in what comes next, and a growing suspicion that doing so is simply not worth it.

5. Be realistic, not idealistic

Moving from trying to eliminate disappointment to tolerating it can make it less destabilising and more informative. As a manager, this might mean developing the habit of noting, at the outset of a project, what a realistic rather than an ideal result would look like.

Similar patterns can appear in relationships too, where expecting things to feel perfect all the time can make an otherwise good relationship seem lacking.

Research consistently shows that naming difficult emotions reduces their intensity, and that workplaces where disappointment can be discussed honestly tend to be psychologically safer, more creative and better at learning from setbacks than those where such feelings are expected to be quietly moved past.

6. Accept disappointment, don’t dismiss it

Disappointment is uncomfortable because it confronts us with limits: to what we can control, to what organisations can deliver, or to what relationships can provide. An understandable instinct is to try to move past this quickly.

But a more constructive approach is to reflect on where our expectations come from, how they are formed, and whether they can be moderated in ways that benefit us. If disappointment is a signal that our expectations and reality are out of alignment, then understanding this may be one of the most important forms of resilience we can develop.

Annette Clancy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Matthias Aspden made a decision that would change the trajectory of his life. A wealthy merchant from Philadelphia, Aspden carefully prepared to leave his home in March 1776 as rumors of revolution circulated. He drafted a will and appointed trusted friends to manage his property while he traveled to England.

As a loyalist, someone who wanted to remain loyal to the crown and the British empire, Aspden believed the war would be brief. Historians estimate that at the beginning of the war as many as one-third of all American colonists identified as loyalists. Aspden believed his departure would be temporary. Order, he assumed, would soon be restored, and he would permanently return within a few years.

But that wasn’t the case.

The American Revolution is often told as a triumphant story of democracy and freedom. But this narrative leaves out a significant group: the loyalist men and women who remained faithful to Britain and, as a result, lost their homes, property and sometimes their sense of belonging.

As a historian of the American Revolution who studies Philadelphia loyalists, I believe Aspden’s story offers a glimpse into an overlooked experience of the war.

A wealthy Philly merchant exiled in England

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Aspden was not a marginal figure. He was a Quaker merchant with extensive property holdings, including a home on Water Street, in what is now the Old City neighborhood, and land in Chester County outside Philadelphia.

When he left in 1776, he abandoned nearly everything he owned, believing he would return. As others celebrated independence that summer, Aspden quietly slipped away to London.

In England, reality set in. Exile was not just physical; it was deeply social and emotional. In Philadelphia, Aspden had been established. In London, he was one of tens of thousands of displaced loyalists trying to rebuild a life. He gravitated toward communities of fellow exiles. These networks offered some stability, but they could not replace what he had left behind.

Aspden’s letters to friends and family from this period reveal a man caught between hope and anxiety. He followed news from Philadelphia obsessively, requesting newspapers and updates from friends and business contacts. At one point, he described himself as “an idle man until I can return to America.” His words suggest both longing and uncertainty, as if his life were on pause.

By 1780, that uncertainty turned into fear.

A ‘traitor’ trying to come back home

Aspden began hearing about laws in Pennsylvania aimed at confiscating loyalist property. These laws required individuals accused of treason to appear in court and defend themselves. Aspden, still in England, could not do so. As a result, he was tried in absentia, declared a traitor and subjected to the state’s harshest penalties.

The consequences were devastating. In 1782, Aspden learned that all of his property had been confiscated and would be sold to aid the patriots in the American Revolution. An official commissioner of confiscation seized his Philadelphia home and wharf, which were worth thousands of pounds, along with his land in Chester County. Aspden, facing financial ruin, decided to return to Philadelphia to defend his name and his property.

In 1785, after nearly a decade abroad and with the war over, he crossed the Atlantic, hoping the new United States would restore his property under the terms of the peace treaty with Britain. Instead, he was met with rejection.

Pennsylvania officials informed him that individuals in his position were not protected. He had no legal claim to his property and, more shockingly, no rights as a citizen. While the peace treaty prevented further confiscation of loyalist property, his property was not restored.

The message was clear: Philadelphia was no longer his home.

One last trip to Philadelphia

Aspden left again, traveling through New Jersey and New York before securing passage back to England. Reflecting on his departure, he wrote of the pain of being forced from his “native country.” His brief return confirmed what he had feared. He had no home.

In the years that followed, Aspden sought compensation wherever he could. The American government offered nothing, so he turned to Britain. The Loyalist Claims Commission, established to reimburse those who had lost property during the war, eventually awarded him just over 1,100 pounds, a fraction of his estimated losses.

Aspden made one final visit to America in the early 1790s. By then, he had received a legal pardon and could travel without fear of arrest. But he still could not recover his property or successfully pursue compensation in American courts. Once again, he left – this time for good.

Heirs recover his fortune

Aspden died in England in 1824, having spent nearly 50 years in exile from the city he always considered home.

Decades after his death, his heirs pursued a legal claim in the United States against Pennsylvania, arguing that his estate had been unjustly seized. After years of litigation, the court ruled in their favor in 1848, awarding them over a half-million dollars – approximately US$20 million today. It was a remarkable reversal, but Aspden never saw justice.

His life raises difficult questions about loyalty, identity and belonging. Aspden did not see himself as disloyal to Philadelphia. To him, loyalty to the British Crown and loyalty to home were not opposites.

His story reminds us that the Revolution was not just a fight for independence. It was also a civil conflict that divided communities and reshaped lives. For every celebrated patriot, there were loyalists like Aspden and others who lost so much during the American Revolution.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Kimberly Nath does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Douglas Stuart’s third novel, John of John, returns to the territory that made his Booker prize-winning Shuggie Bain, and Young Mungo, so unforgettable: the intimate violence of masculinity, and the ways love persists inside families whose members cannot speak or emote plainly to one another.

In Stuart’s Falabay, an imagined town on the Isle of Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, the wind batters – and people have learned to endure by saying less than they mean.

Review: John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador)

John Calum (Cal) Macleod returns home from art school in Edinburgh after his father, John, hints at his grandmother’s escalating ailments. For Cal, coming home means regression and constraint. He is indebted, back under the roof of a father who insists, often with overbearing zeal, on obedience and conformity.

In Edinburgh, with dyed hair, new clothes and the agency to publicly express his homosexuality, Cal had begun to assemble a new self. Back in Falabay, Cal is under the roof of his father, a man of unrelenting principle. Control is John’s dialect of love. Proximity must be earned through deference. John forces Cal to listen to bible readings:

because it was too much to ask his son to call him a couple of times a week, or to sit with him by the fire for a few hours and give him all his news. Too much to ask Cal just to be near him.

Intimacy and violence

The Macleods are a weaving family. Stuart, a trained fashion designer, attends to the material textures of that work in imagery of the lanolin that softens and splits skin and fibres that embed themselves in the knuckles of the men.

In two scenes in particular, Stuart demonstrates his skill at writing the tactile and physical. He illustrates John’s attentive care for his son, as well as his violent impulses. After Cal’s hands have been cracked and inflamed by overexposure to artificial heat in the weave shed, John makes him sit, and cares for him “as he might care for any useful tool”.

Cal washed each hand before John dried them on a clean tea-towel. Then John oiled them, rubbing ointment into each knuckle, caressing the webbing between Cal’s forefinger and thumb. Cal winced occasionally, and John went slower, taking care to rub the lotion into the peeling nail beds.

Later, Cal insists on returning the care and tends to his father’s own damaged hands, tweezing wool from John’s inflamed skin and cleaning the wounds. “Look at you two playing nail salons,” Cal’s grandmother, Ella, jokes – yet the intimacy here is unmistakable.

Stuart writes men who are simultaneously opaque to themselves, and overexposed to the community’s judgement.

John polices Cal’s appearance, forbidding him from attending church with neon orange hair, as though colour itself were a provocation. When Cal insists on attending anyway, John beats him in the car.

“He braced his left hand on Cal’s lapel and with his right he punched his son three more times, each blow stronger in its fury and determination.” The beating over, he glimpses his reflection. “Now that the anger had gone, he didn’t know what had possessed him. When he looked in the mirror he saw a devil, and the devil wore his face.”

The scene captures how visibility becomes a moral test in communities trained to prize conformity.

Stuart refuses to excuse John, allowing him full moral agency. Something (the devil) has influenced his behaviour, but John is still the perpetrator. Despite moments of tenderness towards his son, he remains a man who harms people he loves – and crucially, who cannot and will not apologise.

The novel’s most complex reality lies in a truth disclosed early, then handled with delicate restraint: John is in love with his neighbour and childhood friend, Innes. Their relationship is a long, quiet arrangement of glances and hedged intimacies, often reset by John’s fear and Innes’ patience.

“I haven’t had any time alone with you since … I can’t remember when.”
“Cal will be home soon. You have to be patient, please.”
“Am I not the very model of self-control?”
John exhaled as though blowing on a cup of hot tea. Then he nodded slowly. “You are,” he said, “you are.” […] Seeing they were truly alone, he took a step closer. He took Innes’s hand in his, and he stroked the back of it with the side of his thumb.

Stuart gives Innes an eloquent verdict: “It went like this, loving John Macleod. You did it against all reason, against all your better judgement, and in that exact moment he starved the embers into submission, he had the skill to blow on them gentle and ignite them again.” Loving John is an exercise of endurance.

Desire and rejection

For Cal, desire is improvised and punctured by rejection. He answers a lonely-hearts ad and is rebuffed. He fixates on and tries to seduce Innes, an act of longing and misrecognition – a young man reaching for the closest possibility of being known and understood.

If John’s love is performed through maintenance and denial, Cal’s is performed through desperate pursuit. He wants to be seen and held, tenderly.

Stuart has a gift for the social contours of villages. In the grudges that accrue and create impenetrable fortresses, Stuart illustrates how family fractures become public currency and harden into comic custom. In Falabay, the MacInnes brothers, Innes and Sorley, share a house without having spoken to each other for 16 years.

Every conversation is duplicated, an arrangement of avoidance, because acknowledgement would concede too much. Cal’s childhood friend, Doll Macdonald, nursing old hurt about Cal “leaving him behind” drinks his life into collapse. Stubbornness provides a kind of safety from ruin. No single slight causes these outcomes, nor could an apology prevent them.

Stuart is attentive to the drawn-out violence of pride and how it makes these men choose solitude over repair, principle over mercy.

Falabay is not glamorised: poverty and precarity pervade the novel, though less centrally than in Shuggie Bain or Young Mungo. Employment is seasonal and signing on (claiming unemployment) becomes an ethical debate whispered over the kitchen table, while the weather decides if your family will eat that night.

Cal’s university debts from Edinburgh haunt the family. In one sharp exchange, John and Cal argue in Gaelic about the dole – is it “dishonest,” or simply necessary?

Controversial on Christianity

Stuart’s handling of religion will be the most controversial element for some readers. It would be wrong to say the novel mocks faith, but it does associate the practise of Christianity with control.

The local minister presides rather than pastors, the congregation is fixated on keeping up social appearances rather than neighbourly care and John is a man who turns Scripture into a blunt instrument of discipline. There’s a matching economy here with the island’s other social systems: faith is kept in working order by policing the boundaries of who belongs.

As a Christian reader, I recognise the ache of filial misunderstanding here, but grace is noticeably absent from the novel. Stuart’s fictional church in Falabay is rendered with nuance, but the faith enacted is mostly a language of pressure: public morality without consolation and doctrine without hospitality.

I longed for a glimpse of forgiveness and repair, especially given the novel’s acute awareness of the ways in which shame distorts the expression of love.

Stuart writes the church in the Scottish Isles as these characters experience it, and he refuses the consolation of counterexample. His refusal is an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. The novel’s tone remains austere; every consolation is so hard won.

What the novel intricately captures, with unsparing clarity, is how religious performance can lend cover to pride, and how the need to appear righteous can crowd out gentleness and grace.

John of John is a bleak novel, but not entirely hopeless. Tenderness is an event – fleeting, fragile – all the more arresting because of its scarcity. Stuart slows his sentences around these moments: the shoulder‑to‑shoulder quiet after an argument, his grandmother’s silent interventions, the small, comic abrasions of family life.

Readers of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo will recognise Stuart’s signature: lyrical attention to harm, fierce compassion for children negotiating adult failures, men whose desires costs them dearly, households where harm and love continually conflict.

Falabay may be fictional, but its social world feels unbearably accurate. Stuart has returned to his territory and deepened it.

Caitlin Macdonald is affiliated with The University of Sydney.