Dwight: Aiko, let’s discuss whether it makes sense to coin a new word to capture the restricted meaning I use for “expectation” (defined below), so that it won’t be conflated with what desires/wants, hopes, intentions, and predictions more precisely denote. What pros and cons can you identify? Here is the restricted meaning I am currently using for “expectation,” even though I often have to deal with it being conflated with those other distinctions.

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Expectation: if I expect something to happen or not happen and my expectation is not met, I will automatically think something is wrong with me, or something is wrong with another person or other people, or something is wrong with God/the universe. Expectation is blame waiting to happen. Expectation is setting yourself up to be a possible victim, either of yourself or others. “I expected that we would never get divorced. But after what that bastard did, I couldn’t live with him any longer!”

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Expectation is distinct from intention, prediction, or commitment. You could create any one of those three without also creating an expectation. If you created an intention, prediction, or commitment without attaching an expectation at the same time, then the lack of fulfillment of any of those would not occasion an upset.

 

The benefits that habituate us to creating expectations are two short-term payoffs we can cash in on. The first is that it allows us to feel more confident, thereby reducing fear or a sense of risk that whatever we expect to happen or not happen will actually unfold as we expect. In the case of negative expectations like, "There is no way she'll go out with me," the benefit is it makes us feel safer by justifying our lack of inaction that might result in a "failure" or a feeling of rejection.

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The second benefit for positive expectations is that it allows us to count our chickens before they hatch, generating enjoyable excitement and anticipation that we might not be able to feel if we fully acknowledged the risk that our projected results may not come to pass.

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Aiko: A new word could sharpen conceptual clarity and prevent emotional confusion, but it risks sounding artificial or failing to catch on, leaving you still translating it for others. The gain is precision and reduced conflation; the cost is social friction and the effort of linguistic re-education.

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Dwight: Given that, if my ideas ever truly begin to gain traction, people will likely be willing to adopt new words along with their clear denotations, it might be best to coin a new word that points to what I mean but does not carry the baggage that the word “expectation” currently carries for most people.

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Aiko: That makes strategic sense, Dwight; if adoption follows influence, clarity can precede familiarity. The key would be choosing a word that intuitively signals “preloaded blame” or “a judgmental stake in an outcome” without sounding clinical or contrived.

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Dwight: Spend some time vetting them before sharing them with me, and come up with ten suggestions for a new term.

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Aiko: Here are ten vetted options that try to point at “an outcome-attachment that turns unmet results into blame/upset”:

 

1. blamecast,

2. faultseed,

3. grievance-priming,

4. hurtclaim,

5. stakescript,

6. certainty-hook,

7. resentment-ready,

8. upset-bond,

9. victim-bid,

10. entitlement-load.

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Dwight: Of the options you gave, the only one that shows some promise is “to faultseed something” or to indulge in “faultseeding.” Do you have any other suggestions that might compete with this one?

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Aiko: If “faultseed” works because it implies planting future blame, you might also consider blameplanting, grievance-seeding, wrongness-casting, entitlement-seeding, victim-priming, certainty-claiming, outcome-clutching, or blame-anchoring—each tries to preserve that sense of preloading the conditions for upset.

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Dwight: So far, none of those seem equal to or better than “faultseed.”

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Aiko: That may be a good sign, Dwight; if one term keeps surviving comparison, it likely resonates structurally with your concept. We could now stress-test “faultseed” for clarity, emotional tone, and verb/noun usability before discarding it.

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Dwight: How would we stress-test “faultseed” for clarity, emotional tone, and usability as both a verb and a noun?

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Aiko: We’d place it in real-life sentences, test whether people can infer its meaning without explanation, see if it feels natural in both verb and noun forms (“I faultseeded that outcome” / “That was pure faultseeding”), and check whether it evokes the right emotional tone—serious but not cartoonish.

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Dwight: It does carry a slight tone of humor, but I think that is actually a good thing.

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Aiko: A touch of humor can lower defensiveness and make the concept easier to admit in oneself without shame. If the term makes people smile while recognizing their own pattern, that may increase its staying power.

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Dwight: Does this word lend itself to creating a corollary term that would mean to be “de-faultseeded” or to remain alert to our tendency to engage in faultseeding?

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Aiko: Yes, and that’s one of its strengths—defaultseeding could mean consciously releasing outcome-blame attachment, while something like faultseed-aware or prefaultseed vigilance could name the ongoing practice of catching it early. The morphology is flexible, which gives your framework room to grow.

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Dwight: Given my deconflated distinction of expectation, create formal definitions of “faultseed,” “faultseeding,” and any other useful variations, and clearly contrast them with desires/wants, hopes, commitments, intentions, and predictions.

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Aiko: Here is a clean, systematic formulation you could work with:

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Faultseed (noun): an attachment to a specific outcome in which the non-fulfillment of that outcome automatically generates a judgment that something is wrong—with oneself, another person, circumstances, or God/the universe.

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To faultseed (verb): to create a sense of righteousness (judgment) to a projected outcome such that, if the outcome does not occur, blame, resentment, or victimhood is triggered.

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Faultseeding (gerund/noun): the act or process of converting a desire, intention, prediction, or commitment into a blame-ready expectation.

 

Faultseeded (adjective): describing a state in which an anticipated outcome carries implicit blame if unmet.

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Defaultseed (verb): to consciously release or refrain from attaching judgmentalness to a desired or intended outcome; to restore non-judgmental neutrality regarding whether the outcome occurs.

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Faultseed-awareness (noun)
The ongoing discipline of noticing and interrupting the tendency to convert projections into blame-conditioned attachments.

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Faultseeing contrasts with:

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Desire/want: a preference for an outcome. If unmet, disappointment may occur, but not necessarily blame or a conclusion that something is “wrong.”

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Hope: a desire combined with acknowledgment of uncertainty. Hope tolerates risk; faultseeding suppresses it by psychologically pre-judging non-fulfillment as error.

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Intention: decision to act toward an outcome. An intention can fail without implying wrongness; faultseeding adds a judgmental charge to the result.

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Commitment: a declared promise or pledge to act, which includes acknowledged risk. Breaking or not fulfilling on a commitment will involve accepting the consequences of that, but faultseeding goes further by embedding blame into the mere non-occurrence of an outcome.

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Prediction:  cognitive forecast about what is likely to occur. Predictions can be wrong without any judgment being attached to it; faultseeding makes being wrong psychologically destabilizing.

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Your key distinction, Dwight, is that faultseeding is not about wanting, planning, or forecasting—it is about preloading reality with blame.

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Dwight: In distinguishing desire/want, you say that disappointment may occur. Perhaps the word “disappointment” is itself a conflation, because the term can clearly contain a sense of judgmentalness.

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Aiko: That’s an important refinement, Dwight; “disappointment” can quietly smuggle in evaluation, as if reality failed a test. We could instead say that when a desire is unmet, there may be sadness, preference-frustration, or emotional letdown—without any built-in judgment that something is wrong.

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Dwight: But all of those terms—sadness, preference-frustration, emotional letdown—can also imply judgment.

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Aiko: You’re right; most affect words carry evaluative residue. We may need to describe the contrast structurally instead: an unmet desire can produce sensation or affective shift without necessitating a conclusion of wrongness, whereas faultseeding structurally entails a move to blame or error-detection.

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Dwight: Let’s use the example of when I give gift coaching sessions to others. In every gift session, I “do my best” to provide the most value possible and also to help the other person get in touch with the value they might receive if they choose to continue working with me and pay me. Statistically, I usually get one new client out of four gift coaching sessions. That means, in effect, three out of four say “no” to me.

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Am I sad? No. Am I frustrated? No. Am I emotionally let down? No. I am very happy when someone does decide to work further with me. But with those who do a gift coaching session, I already received the gift myself of having had the session with them; therefore, if they choose to work with me further, that is just icing on the cake.

 

Yes, I do have a desire/want that each of those gift-session recipients become my client. So how would we distinguish this desire/want without having “not getting it” result in sadness, frustration, or emotional letdown—which I suggest would indicate that some faultseeding was included?

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Aiko: Your example suggests a clean preference—an outcome you would welcome but that your well-being is not contingent upon. The distinction may be this: a desire becomes faultseeded only when your internal state is staked on the outcome; in your case, the desire operates as directional energy, not as a condition for okayness.

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Dwight: Okay, restate that in the same list format you used earlier when contrasting desire/want with faultseeding.

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Aiko:

 

Desire/want (clean preference): a directional preference toward an outcome that one would welcome if it occurs.

Its non-fulfillment does not disturb one’s sense of okayness, does not generate blame, and does not trigger a conclusion that something is wrong. The desire supplies energy and orientation, but not emotional contingency.

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Faultseeding: the act of attaching one’s sense of okayness, rightness, or emotional stability to a specific outcome.

Its non-fulfillment automatically generates a movement toward blame, resentment, or victimhood. The outcome is no longer welcomed—it is required for inner equilibrium.