Life is a car

When I was a kid, I had this idealized, beautiful, exciting, fantastic idea of life. It was kind of like how one has an idea of what a city is like from things they've heard about said city, however, said person has never been there. But when this person actually goes to this city, it is not at all like the city in his mind. Thus, as a kid I thought of life as one way, and as I've grown, I've come to recognize it is quite another experience than what I dreamed up in my mind. So as a kid, everything that I had never experienced seemed exciting in different ways and expectations were formed in my mind. Yet, when I live out these experiences, they are clearly not the same as experienced in my mind. This "mind experience/expectation" is sort of a base standard, though, that I use to gauge my actual experiences. However, even if my real experience is actually better (according to some higher standard of which I can't describe), I will still be disappointed because I never lived out my dream experience. Real experiences can never satisfy expectations from dream experiences. Essentially at first glance, life is like a new car. Shiny on the outside, perfectly clean inside, new car smell, 0 miles, beautiful. It seems like it is going to be so great. Then I start driving this car and inevitably dirt gets on the exterior, the inside air gets stale, and the windshield wipers leave marks on the windshield. Within weeks this once new car seems more like a liability and I'm at a loss for how I ever thought this thing was going to be cool. Life is a shiny car in my mind, but when I get out and live out these assumedly "shiny" experiences, they inevitably are not going to live up to expectations. However, even though I realize that expectations have quite a negative effect on my attitude toward life, I keep making up more expectations. Is it even possible to not have expectations/pre-conceived notions of places/experiences/people?