A Pessimist's Guide to Optimism

I have been a life-long pessimist until relatively recently, and I could never understand why you'd look forward to something that might not happen and risk disappointment, when you could just shrug and expect the worst. The theory there is that you'd only be pleasantly surprised by positive results and already expected the bad, however, without hoping, dreaming, or just outright looking forward to stuff, you'll miss out on the joy that comes from getting not just a good thing, but a good thing you wanted. Optimism's new ground for me, and I feel my 'faith' was tested earlier. Almost everyone will have heard of the Connecticut school shooting, with 26 victims, 20 of which were just kids. Now, that in itself is not what tested me. What got me, was a blog post criticising the view that 'the world is a beautiful place' and using the tragedy in Connecticut solitary proof. This got me thinking, and after some ruminations  my thoughts have spelled out what I can only describe as an explanation of optimism for pessimists.

Firstly, a quick disclaimer, I'm not going to belittle the victim's loss in any way shape or form, I'm just sharing a view about views on the world that the shooting brought up.

Seeing the world as a beautiful place isn't suggesting that tragedies such as the aforementioned shooting  are good in any way, but it's about looking at life in a positive view. Everyone loses loved ones, and while no parent should ever have to suffer their child's death, it can and does happen. For those who are lost, they're either with their respective deity or completely free from all the hassles of life. And for the people left, well, people grieve, people mourn, but eventually, people recover.

Let's use some imagination for a rather abstract representation here. Think of each action in life as either good or bad, and let's call them heads and tails, as if a coin. Now, with a minuscule number of exceptions, everyone gets at least some things to be happy about. I saw a homeless man, sitting on the bank of a river with a dog by his side sharing a soggy... something. He had the biggest smile on his face. Maybe it was because he had some food today, maybe it was companionship, but whatever it was, something was good. Now, he may have only had one good thing that day, one head in a number of flips of the coin, but all there is to it is to work through the bad, and then look back and think, remember that good thing? Don't count your life in terms of 12:46 heads:tails, just sort out the tails and when you get bummed out, just think, you had 12 heads. That's 12 more than you could have had.

Now it's not easy to change your whole outlook on life, but if you're fed up being bummed out with life, then force yourself. Every time you feel crappy about life, remember the last good thing that happened. It doesn't even have to be anything that you consider good, but maybe something you take for granted that you may not have in a worse situation. A roof over your head, enough to eat, a computer, that kind of thing. If you really stick at it, eventually it'll become automatic and you'll be all round happier. Trust me.