How Optimistic Are You?

Bright sunshine: Life is great--and it will continue that way! Not only do you tend to find the silver lining in every cloud, you also believe that silver lining will stick around for the long term.

Woohoo! Certainly I have moments but this is most accurate.

(I didn't take note of the Ronald Reagan thing, BTW.)

I want to go see the 'bad' movie because all my local reviewers are morons who couldn't identify a good movie to save their lives - would that be pessimism or just plain misanthropy?

The only honest answer was for the election - "The country is in such a bad state, no one can possibly do anything to fix it."

not today.

Donna, huggelz! :-)

I'm quite optimistic, though at the back of my mind, I'm often thinking that good times will be followed by bad.

I'm an ugly mixture of the two. I spout all kinds of "look on the bright side crap and believe it, too, but I'm still panicky and jealous and convinced I'm never going to make anything of myself.

Sunshine with patchy fog: Everything's coming up roses--most of the time. Your outlook is optimistic, but you tend to think more positively in the short term rather than in the long run. You see the good side of the present moment but don't necessarily incorporate that into your overall attitude.

I am another person for whom the questions were ridiculously inapplicable to my life, tho.

I suppose I was too optimistic about this thread.

tend towards broadly optimistic meself

Although it's not foolproof, I usually attempt to apply Hamlet's dictum that 'there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.' It may just be a trick of thought, but it works a surprising amount of the time. Count me as broadly optimistic, when I can remember to be.

that’s like stoicism or something right

my glass gets emptier every day

stoicism? god, no! the stoics basically believed that the only response to the screaming horror of life on earth was to constantly remind oneself that you really couldn't expect anything better and being sad about it was nonsensical. it was the apotheosis of rational pessimism.

I'm generally optimistic, but I don't know why

unsurprisingly I am not an optimist; if optimism were a scientific theory it would have about the credence level of flat-eartherism or leeches, given how often and how thoroughly it is proven not only wrong, but wildly off the mark of what actually happened

and yet it's adherents would be happier and more accomplished than those who followed the more "correct" outlook of pessimism.

its

which is why I'm an optimist. Pessimism causes one to be a miserable waste of life ime. I'd rather kid myself into thinking X Y Z are gonna be great, things are gonna work out, etc than shoot them down before they've even had a chance to turn out well. If things go sour, then hey at least I had those moments of hope and joy. If I had been pessimistic, the unpleasant experience of being letdown by X Y and Z would've occurred much earlier and thus I would've never even had those good moments.

it's more, on the occasions I have been optimistic, I have gotten my hopes up for X Y Z, and then either X, Y, and Z didn't happen, or not only did they not happen, bu A, B, and C happened instead, which were far worse than anything I imagine. realism prevents this from happening; your options are preparedness or pleasant surprise, crushing disappointment is not in the outcome set

in general I do not understand how there are any optimists left after 2016 (really, the cutoff year could have been much earlier, but for people in the US or UK this is the most striking case)

because being a pessimist is no fun

given how often and how thoroughly it is proven not only wrong, but wildly off the mark of what actually happened

Pessimism doesn't have a great track record either, esp at the level of the personal. I know ppl who worry about every little thing, nonstop, their entire lives. 99% of the shit they worry about never happens.

or if it does happen, it's nowhere near as awful as they built it up to be

I am pretty irritated by people/circumstances and think the future of the general world is pretty dire but I am also consistently content/cheery on a day to day basis. I don't know what that is. Powers of 10.

i think things turn out pretty well for most people a lot of the time, but catastrophism is fashionable amongst certain idk groupings or possibly it maybe gives one licence to not give it a good lash anyway yknow

optimism or practicality, either way, maybe its just more empowering or useful to think you can do things that would help your situation

"pretty well" allows for all sorts of starting positions, expectations, whatnot.

Don't know any optimistic people and don't know what an optimist looks like, so this thread is fascinating. I associate optimism with Americans mostly.

Pessimism connected to future outcomes is purely a product of a small part of your consciousness. Westerners are generally taught that this narrowly restricted piece of our conscious existence is the apex and sine qua non of human life, the source of truth and light, our sole defense in a chaotic and menacing world.

The trick to escaping this worship of foresight, control and rationality is to turn the searchlight of consciousness onto itself and see it for what it is, moment to moment, in real time. This breaks the near-hypnotic spell it can exert. It is not what we tell ourselves. Our mind is far more and much different. Rationality boasts about itself, but it lies to us constantly. Diminish your belief in its power to tell you The Truth and you'll be much happier and calmer.

I don't know much about optimism though tbf possibly because it didn't play any part whatsoever in my childhood.

Pessimism doesn't have a great track record either, esp at the level of the personal. I know ppl who worry about every little thing, nonstop, their entire lives. 99% of the shit they worry about never happens.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, 20 April 2020 19:31 (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

or if it does happen, it's nowhere near as awful as they built it up to be

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, 20 April 2020 19:32 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

seems fairly otm to me, if we're each allowed our own truth on it

this maybe goes a bit into that risk thread that someone bumped but I think of pessimistic people as ones who just kind of stall out on doing anything forwards thinking because of reasons... I am not hugely hopeful on anything in the future but I like to say yes, and try new things and be proactive and it's great when I am pleasantly surprised and it works out and if it doesn't then it still can be a useful experience.

yes i thought of the risk thread for pretty much those kind of reasons too

i think inability to achieve purity or perfection fits in somewhere too, maybe, as someone who is prone (but was a lot worse, once) to delay and avoidance on decisions, etc etc

i find pessimism is fine as long as you can manage _philosophical_ pessimism. there's pessimism that's hoping for the best but knowing "the best" will never actually happen and there's the pessimism where one ceases to hope for the best entirely. i do what i can, i don't expect much from that, i try to do what i can to mourn loss and accept failure because those things are inevitable.

maybe that's actually optimism? idk.

the pessimism that aggressively demands constant reaffirmation of the worst is the real one to watch

Just trying to see things as they are honest

I don't think of myself as particularly optimistic but I launch new projects all the time and shrug off/forget about failures almost instantly. I wasn't always this way; as a teenager I was as inclined to bemoan my tragic existence as anyone else. I think passing 40 or even 45 had a big effect on my general mental equilibrium, as did developing a chronic illness I have no hope of curing. Now I live day to day, mostly, and am happy about it. Sometimes I worry about things, of course - "What if I run out of money?" "What if my wife gets really sick?" - but for the most part I set small goals ("I need to write this record review today"), break big projects into small chunks, and when I meet the relatively low expectations I've set for myself, I'm happy.

I think my biggest manifestation of "optimism" at the moment is that I have set a single large, far-in-the-future goal and am currently still convinced that a) it will happen and b) my life will be better for it. It's not something I fixate on, just something I make tiny incremental steps toward whenever possible.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

I think about this poem a lot. I think it's inaccurate -- Hope doesn't just ask things of us, it demands we act courageously.

Hope is different than optimism though, subtly. Optimism means you think there will be some good outcome to your actions. Hope is more like, a responsibility to act, even though you very well might fail.

you think that ppl who don't have hope it is bc they don't want to act courageously? it may call us to those acts but imo it doesn't demand it and hope comes first + does give us succor. better to be hopeful than pessimistic even when pragmatism suggests caution (pragmatism about maintaining equilibrium deserves a vote here as well!). in terms of whether things in the future will work out or not i'm probably inclined slightly towards pessimism at least in the sort of "man plans god laughs" sense, but in a more general sense i'm hopeful that there will be a future and living creatures with lives worth living and in general inclined towards believing in a divine plan that orders chaos and makes sense out of suffering so even if i expect more suffering in the future i don't feel everything is bleak.

i don't think that's the only reason people don't have hope. but optimism can be very uncomfortable. people sometimes set their expectations low to avoid disappointment.

if there is a chance things can be better, i feel like that puts pressure on you to do something to make that happen. hope binds you to the future.

Intellectually I'm a pessimist, emotionally I'm an optimist. That is, when I think rationally about the future I figure it's going to be pretty bad, and I don't think I have better chances of having things go well than anyone else does. That's why I didn't do a Ph.D. program, although I know people who have made it work - I just couldn't convince myself I had enough of a chance of being one of those people to make it worth the risk. But on an emotional, day-to-day level I mostly (barring episodes of worrying that I have corona or whatever) feel pretty positive and hopeful. I don't think this is due to anything I've done - I'm not, like, trying to Think Positive. I think it's just brain chemistry.

A few years ago I was on a hormonal birth control that gave me severe anxiety, and the best way I could explain it was that my sense of the probabilities of things reversed itself. Normally I know bad things happen to everyone but usually figure the chances of them happening to me right at this moment are pretty slim, so I can go about my life without being paralyzed by fear. But all of a sudden a switch flipped and I was constantly convinced they were more likely to happen to me, in fact they were practically certain to. I went off the pill and things went back to normal, but since then I don't put any trust in my own innate sense of how things are going to turn out.

the thing about hope pressing you to "make something happen," is that it ascribes a level of control to the individual that, in practice and especially in modern society, that the individual doesn't possess. and it's a short step from there to blaming the individual for one's circumstances, which must have been because they failed to make something happen and not because any given person is at the mercy of societal forces, often bad, that are orders of magnitude larger and more complex for them to have an effect on

i dont think thats an absolute on every level at every time, meself

but its a personal outlook to a degree, i wont be telling anyone it is or isnt so

say that im optimistic that i have plenty of input into how things go, and have gone, and may go in future for me

locus of control whatyoucallit stuff

and yet it's adherents would be happier and more accomplished than those who followed the more "correct" outlook of pessimism.

This is a strange old sentence.

Keep pressing ahead. Making gear I'll at least wear into town.
Excitamundo.
Well just got book on interior of a sewing machine so may get to know how that works.
But lacking energy.
Hoping there is a better tomorrow.
Things will get better or change or something.
Optimistic to some extent.
Is there a measure.
Should I just say every day in every way I'm getting. ...
Different or not or something.
Vague enough?

No it isn't, Tom

I think I am naturally and personally optimistic and ideologically pessimistic, if that makes sense?

i think it does, yeah

context matters.

im paid to be pessimistic at work, i think most people in an org machinery are, maybe?

iirc optimism and pessimism are just like filters through which one views the world, neither of which having much influence on the world-at-large, but pessimism probably having an appreciable degree of influence on one's own well-being, so like why not just choose optimism. Is the question I keep asking myself over and over.

Not a pessimist per se, just that it seems that nobody ever lost a buck predicting the drop of another shoe, is all.

and yet thats a filter

Acknowledged!

De- and reprogramming the brane is hard.

Maybe someone addressed the following point upthread: the question's meaningless if you suffer from depression or anxiety.

I know what you want to say, Meno. Do you realize what a debater's argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for....As the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things. As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only---a process men call learning---discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection. We must, therefore, not believe that debater's argument, for it would make us idle, and fainthearted men like to hear it, whereas my argument makes them energetic and keen on the search. I trust that this is true, and I want to inquire along with you into the nature of virtue.

(xp) But at least you have the comfort of having the 'correct' outlook.

the thing about hope pressing you to "make something happen," is that it ascribes a level of control to the individual that, in practice and especially in modern society, that the individual doesn't possess. and it's a short step from there to blaming the individual for one's circumstances, which must have been because they failed to make something happen and not because any given person is at the mercy of societal forces, often bad, that are orders of magnitude larger and more complex for them to have an effect on

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine)

Maybe someone addressed the following point upthread: the question's meaningless if you suffer from depression or anxiety.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i have a long history of depression and anxiety and right now, honestly, my anxiety is not particularly well-controlled. i wake up at 2 or 3 or 4 am every morning and i worry about things and i struggle to get back to sleep. some nights i do, some nights i don't.

i don't think the question is "meaningless". i've been lucky. i have lots of people helping and supporting me and, also importantly, i had a very effective medical intervention for my depression that a lot of people don't have access to right now. but i've also worked, gotten to a point where i can not only (most of the time) cope with my despair, rumination, worry, feelings of helplessness, but acknowledge the root causes of them. there's very little i can do about most of my problems, but "very little" is not "nothing".

the challenge for me is that i've felt two very different types of fear, first the fear i was raised with, paralyzing fear. fear that tells me that nothing i do will ever be good enough, that terrible shit will happen to me no matter how hard i try, that doing anything is ultimately meaningless. that is a very common thought pattern among people who have suffered abuse. and lately i have this very different sort of fear, this motivating fear, that drives me _towards_ the terrifying thing. i'm afraid of what will happen if i don't act "courageously", which is why all this talk of "bravery" does confuse me, because while at some point there were almost certainly choices i made, probably repeatedly over a long period of time, to cause me to act this way, because i haven't always reacted in this way to stress and uncertainty, it's not like i get up in the morning and ask myself whether i should be "brave" or not; it happens or it doesn't.

the temptation with being "brave" is to... this is a weird thing, but in "breath of the wild" there's a zora who tries to train himself to fight the electric beast by shocking himself with a trident over and over again. this doesn't make any difference and will never make any difference. he's just torturing himself for no reason. i can relate to that.

anyway, i know none of this is anything new, but getting past the all-or-nothing mindset that "nothing i do matters" and finding _something_ i can affect, no matter how pitiful or meaningless it might seem in comparison to the problems we're facing, often (though not always) does a good job of getting me past the learned helplessness.

I've long wanted to be a more optimistic person, but I have trouble shaking my innate pessimism. Weirdly, I've actually (with the exception of the usual ups and downs) been a lot more positive when dealing with the pandemic, mostly because it's easier to shift it into the space of, "I clearly have no control over the vast majority of this, so focus on the positives". I've just been terrible at adapting that to the small things, I tended to gravitate towards essentially assuming the worst in any possible outcome, which was built up as a defense mechanism over many years - "hey, if I anticipate that it'll be catastrophically awful, I won't be as disappointed when it's just a regular ol' negative outcome". Which obviously is a terrible way to move forward. Recently I think I've shifted that to a more neutral state of assumptions, less pessimistic, but I'm still not good at turning it into true optimism.

i have a long history of depression and anxiety and right now, honestly, my anxiety is not particularly well-controlled. i wake up at 2 or 3 or 4 am every morning and i worry about things and i struggle to get back to sleep. some nights i do, some nights i don't.

i don't think the question is "meaningless". i've been lucky. i have lots of people helping and supporting me and, also importantly, i had a very effective medical intervention for my depression that a lot of people don't have access to right now. but i've also worked, gotten to a point where i can not only (most of the time) cope with my despair, rumination, worry, feelings of helplessness, but acknowledge the root causes of them. there's very little i can do about most of my problems, but "very little" is not "nothing".

lovely response, esp the last line.

pathologising misery is a classic optimist move

thank you alfred!

jon, your post is interesting because my wife and i are both big worriers and we focus our worries very differently. she tends to worry about more close-to-home concerns, like whether or not the roof is leaking, while i worry about big things, like whether market capitalism is on the brink of collapse. the thing is, neither of us are necessarily worrying in a productive fashion. both of us do also tend to assume the worst. i haven't found this helpful because the "worst" outcome, specifically the "worst" outcome i've been imagining, tends not to actually happen, and worrying about something that isn't happening (whether that be the floor rotting out from under us or mass death camps) detracts from my ability to deal with what _is_ happening.

the pandemic has helped to a small extent because i'm less alone. if everybody else is freaking out then it's easier to give myself permission to freak out, and i find that often when i stop trying to logic away the panicked pseudo-arguments my anxiety comes up with on a regular basis, when i'm not under pressure to _justify_ the way i'm feeling, i ruminate less.

Kate, that is really interesting to read, I get it completely. With the pandemic, I'm able to sort of contain that and not dwell, but give me something to worry about around the house that is bigger than just something I can fix simply myself (i.e. a rotting section of fence that needs to be replaced), and I'll lose hours of sleep playing it out in my head. I wish I could take some of the former and apply it to the latter, but sometimes I think my head just seeks out something, let's be honest, relatively insignificant to obsessively worry about, to the detriment of my sleep and sanity.

neither of us are necessarily worrying in a productive fashion.

there's a productive fashion of worrying?

re/ some things upthread, and my idea of hope as calling people to take responsibility for the future, i didn't mean to offend the hopeless. i was just saying, contra emily dickinson, that hope does ask something of us.

also, it can be understood in an existential way. like sisyphus knows the rock is going to slide right back down the mountain but he struggle to get it to the top anyway. in a larger sense, nothing lasts forever. we are doomed in the long run but can choose to work toward something anyway.

however, camus said sisyphus was happy, not an optimist necessarily.

people find themselves in tough circumstances with no way out, that's not a question. and i guess you can't be classically optimistic in those situations. but maybe you can adjust your aim? hope can be a very faint glimmer but still provide strength. and comfort too, as dickinson and mordy said, but one with strings attached to it.

there's a productive fashion of worrying?

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, April 21, 2020 12:13 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

A therapist once helped me reframe my personal anxiety by pointing out that is something of a productive anxiety. Meaning that it tends to propel rather than paralyze. So yeah, I think there is, kinda.

I mean this is also colored by the fact that I think the just-world hypothesis/bootstraps myth/internal locus of control/law of attraction (all different ways of saying that individuals are more responsible for their lives than the accumulation of trillions-plus other individual and societal forces, both present and past) is one of the single most poisonous ideas in, perhaps, the history of human existence, and has been a huge barrier to so many kinds of social progress.

but it's permeated into american thought so deep that it's medicalized as a symptom, and to defend it people will argue against or simply ignore irrevocable facts. "you say one of the single most influential factors of any given person's life outcomes was the circumstances of their birth, for which that person was either not present or not conscious? sure, whatever, they're still where they are because they're irresponsible"

The optimism/pessimism duality is probably not the most helpful lens through which to view the perennial problem of suffering.

perhaps not, but it's also not that very easily separable from it, even if people aren't in this thread saying "well optimism lets you TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN LIFE"

So yeah, I think there is, kinda.

I'm kinda with you, lol. It's almost a semantic point: worry can spur you into action, but you have to stop actively worrying to be productive.

I mean, a good example from me earlier today:

optimism: it'll all be OK, everything happens for a reason and works itself out! things will reopen soon, and you can get a haircut then.
pessimism: the total lockdown time has already blown past early estimates, all indications are this will last for several more months, possibly all of 2020, and perhaps into 2021, and your usual hair salon may not survive it anyway, so cut your damn hair before it, too, deteriorates further

(it isn't just me, either, I've heard at least two variations from friends now of "every day I don't get a haircut is dumb optimism that this will be over soon")

im not american

i think there's plenty in the various angles discussed to show how you can take a couple views of lots of things and some views are maybe more useful or empowering or help you or whatever

to insist on linking that with bootstraps or talking down to anyone with problems is yknow a bit of a reach imo

and idk but tbh i think we have lots of threads for all the other things

maybe in hoping for that im being optimistic lol

is it a reach when it has been explicitly stated by people

re: haircuts: interesting example! my perspective on haircuts is a little different. for me pessimism is that i shouldn't bother trying to cut my own hair because i'll fuck it up and look horrible and be stuck wearing wigs forever, and optimism is hey, even if it isn't perfect, i'll at least have time to grow it out, and i might learn a useful skill that way though.

i guess optimism is less about the "what" than the "why". maybe "everything is fiiiiine" is optimism, but to me, there's a line between optimism and delusion, and certain people seem to be pole-vaulting over that line, particularly if it's the sort of "optimism" that requires one to take no steps to look after one's own well-being or the well-being of one's loved ones in any way.

to insist on linking that with bootstraps or talking down to anyone with problems is yknow a bit of a reach imo

and idk but tbh i think we have lots of threads for all the other things

― steer calmer (darraghmac)

idk, i'm not sure i agree. to what extent is "optimism" saying to oneself "i can do this!" and pessimism saying to oneself "i can't do this!"?

I think the end of your post earlier was a good summation of how i tend to see it, rush

to insist it has to be the one thing or another seems v reductive to me

I think optimism/pessimism and belief in one's abilities aren't exactly the same thing

for instance, I am fairly confident that, given time and motivation, I am capable of learning any given programming language enough to do a reasonable thing I'd like to do with it. I am not optimistic that I would be able to get a job as a programmer, or a job that I will enjoy. because one thing is within my control, and one thing is not

saying "i can do this" is not conservative bootstrap theory. it's the bare minimum for being able to function in the world.

what "this" is maybe needs to be redefined. if you're catatonically depressed you can't decide to feel better. you can decide to do what is in your power to move forward to feel better, whether that means seeking treatment or something else. and doing that requires some ray of optimism -- not that you'll be happy forever, but that life is worth it and you can have power to change your situation.

fair enough!

there is plenty that is not in people's control. so they have to find their optimism in some other place, i guess.

like emily dickinson, in the "hope is the thing with feathers" poem, isn't saying she hopes for fame, fortune, romantic love, whatever. she lived in obscurity, partially for reasons she chose and partially due to a repressive and sexist society. the hope she is talking about is something else.

the problem with that line of thinking is that "seeking treatment" -- and this is from the perspective of someone who has done it -- requires a lot of things to happen that are not in your control. you need to have enough money to continuously afford it (very much hugely not a given). you need to be geographically located in a place where it is possible (not a given, even now). you need somebody to answer your call (nowhere near a given). you need that person to have availability (also nowhere near a given). you need the treatment to actually work (nowhere near a given). if it's medication you need to have the supply chain for it not fucked up (not as much as a given as people think it is until it's too late). et cetera. none of these things are in your power, they require hundreds of factors to align correctly

(hell, even the "I am capable of learning _____" thing is not in my control in the sense that it has a lot to do with my education and books/games/toys I had access to as a child, which has even more to do with my parents' circumstances)

right.

there are people suffering from depression who have no hope of receiving adequate treatment. and that is a fact of the world that i would like to change. i am not on the right.

but from that standpoint, if that is the reality, what do you do? i wouldn't blame someone for feeling totally hopeless and defeated. but if i was talking to them, i wouldn't suggest that they feel hopeless. i would listen and if they said some things that had a note of hope in it -- like mentioning something they enjoyed -- i would probably try to gently encourage that. i'm not a therapist though.

i just think optimism needs to be uncoupled from the bad-faith norman vincent peale version, where people are deluded into thinking they can change things they can't. people can't do that and it's cruel and dishonest to say people are totally in control of their lives. (i agree with this totally).

but even in dire circumstances, people can--and have--held on to hope.

like, even if something is a lost cause you can still try. people with bad prognoses get treatment. most people i know still recycle even though the environmental outlook for the planet is bleak. i think it's just what people do.

hmmm. when i'm thinking pessimistically my tendency is to look at all the things that need to go right, things that are out of my control, and think of them as hopeless, and also to give up the whole thing as lost if one of those things doesn't go right. which can be unhelpful to me, because there are many, many ways to treat depression. none of those ways are easy. when i am depressed or anxious, having one of those ways closed off often feels like more of a disaster than it is. part of pessimism is that it's not a delusional or wrong way of looking at things, it's not, as others have pointed out, an either/or, it's about sliding one's calculations of risk just more towards the side of failure than an optimist might.

depression means failure hurts worse for me than success feels good. often when i succeed, in fact, i do feel empty, i do feel like i've accomplished nothing of value. it's hard for me to differentiate between what are, for me, very real cognitive biases and the world just being shit (which it absolutely and completely is in many, many ways).

feeling powerless is not a good feeling. even in a horrendous and unequal world you need to hold onto your power and make decisions that you think are right, because you think they're right. that's optimism to me.

maybe that's not the dictionary definition though.

i def don't advise ppl to be optimistic or anything

theres times it works out ok for me but obv its a dreadful thing to say to anyone

practically an attack, really

lighten up, deems. /dreadful_things_to_say

relevant: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-was-coronavirus-hard-predict/610432/

id argue that they are missing the word "feckless" in order to present a skewed take on the American approach and id almost argue that a personal aversion to the concept of optimism has brought that same skewed take here

but I won't argue.

I don’t know if, like, the fiscal conservatism that leads to woefully underfunded disaster preparedness apparatuses in America can be classified as “optimism”

The optimism there consists of the cheerful belief that whatever disaster befalls the USA, the person who spent millions of their personal fortune paying for propaganda favoring fiscal conservatism and "small government" will only suffer, at most, a brief inconvenience to their otherwise ever-growing wealth, power and influence.

the secondmost annoying plural I’ve heard/read this week, after “octopuses,” has to be “apparatuses”

But you speak English as a first language, not Latin like John Stuart Mill I would hope.

how about octopodes?

I’m just trying to communicate for fucks sake

I’ll run all my posts by el tomboto from now on

Maybe it is to do more with the locus of control question tho

Can one be an optimist for one's own personal path without therefore shilling for a filthy system of gain in a world going to shit* or is there a line that a person can walk where optimism is a good thing

Is there a defiance to optimism, or is the only permissible defiance the rejection of anything that might not be perfect? What boundary can be trusted between the personal optimism and the wider judgement of things (and, ofc, the opposite question fairly asked of the pessimist who might be accused of projecting hopelessness a little too gleefully as a defence against a participation they either despise or cannot handle)?

(* take as read that the world is going to shit, for the purposes)

I’m a 6/10

<3

Is there a defiance to optimism, or is the only permissible defiance the rejection of anything that might not be perfect? What boundary can be trusted between the personal optimism and the wider judgement of things (and, ofc, the opposite question fairly asked of the pessimist who might be accused of projecting hopelessness a little too gleefully as a defence against a participation they either despise or cannot handle)?

ask me ten years ago, I was actually in a good headspace and excited about the future.

ask me today, I'm like a pinball machine.

i get annoyed by mindless negativity (the type of people who write blogs like "Are U Happy? Here's 25 Reasons Why You Should Not Be"), but I have an easier time acknowledging when things are bad, the prognosis is bad, and accepting that I have to find a way to exist and make do the best I can rather than letting it immobilize me.

by the time I'm 80 I'll have this down pat.

That closing line does strike me as at least some element of truth, whether that be I get wiser, more accepting of the unacceptable, or my own lot improves over time is maybe the question tho

I mean fair play, you usually hide it better than this.
― scampus fugit (gyac),

Never sure whether to get into it directly or not, tbh, but the idea that four or five people on this site get carte blanche to constantly disapprove in a fairly sneering manner of everyone not of their own particularly hard-left view seems to me to not be beyond the odd poke back.

The response always seems to come around to "but how dare youse, we are right" which, yknow, good luck with that and how's it goin?

We may not agree on this, I think that's ok too. Possibly optimistic.

Given as a starting point the recognition that the entire human project has basically been a fallen venture since the advent of agriculture/sedentism and that the various societies we've built and destroyed since then have been replete with unending shit and misery for not only ourselves but all the species within our shared biosphere, I'd say I'm pretty goshdarned optimistic!

Probably for another thread, do you really think that misery increaseth or do you really just presume you'd be one of five people to have had idk plumbing and dentistry in the year 800 before a Viking got you aged 15

As I say, possible another thread

I finally came around to the understanding (my understanding, mind, not necessarily the right understanding) of optimism/pessimism as lenses that basically have no real-world impact beyond their effect upon one's own general well-being, so I figure why not look on the sunny side as the flesh melts off my face.

Talk of history is inherently reactionary iirc.

but the idea that four or five people on this site get carte blanche to constantly disapprove in a fairly sneering manner of everyone not of their own particularly hard-left view seems to me to not be beyond the odd poke back.

I think that works extremely well as a filter both ways!

XP OL that's somewhat on topic for the revive, I think, the interface between a personal optimism and wider circumstances and whether it exists outside of the cranium

And following from that whether optimism is an internal reading or a conscious decision, etc etc

I'm not sure it could be convincingly argued that it wasn't in itself a more useful approach, tbh, but obv there'll be reams of opinion offered or already existing on that philosophical quandary

Great revive. :)

I decided this morning that I'm no longer going to post on the politics threads for a while, because the discourse just felt too soul-crushing. Personally, I would rather feel hopeful now and be disappointed later than to approach every day with the same cynical fatalism. Some people might think that makes me naive, but I don't think so.

I'm fully aware of the possibility that things *might* go awry, and am cognizant of all of the potential pitfalls on the road ahead, I'm just not convinced that they necessarily *will.* I don't think the fix is in, or that the future is foretold. Too much has happened in the last few years that none of us would have been able to predict beforehand. Relatedly, I don't believe that past is always precedent, or that people are incapable of change.

On some level, though, I think I *need* to believe in hope, in the possibility of a better future, the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, etc., because the alternative is just too bleak. To accept the notion that everything's already fucked and there's not much any of us can do about it is wholly dispiriting. I refuse to accept that. I need something to fight for, to look ahead toward on the horizon, even if it's cloudy and distant. I don't know how life is worth living without it.

I wake up a little optimistic before I open up ilx.

Jaymc echoing what I said months ago, hi 5.
I think pessimism/hopeless and optimism/hopeful are both defense mechanisms for dealing with bad shit.

The benefit of pessimism is you have such low expectations that you're almost never disappointed by them not being met. The trick is to have very low expectations yet have that drive you into optimism.

I try to be optimistic about everything except pop music.

Oh yeah, Granny, I remember reading that post months ago and thinking you were OTM! And I agree that both are defense/coping mechanisms.

I don't think I can be an optimist about the world at large. I try to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic about my personal life. For me, as for a lot of people (I think), that's easier said than done. It's always easier to imagine the worst, somehow. I will say that having something to look forward to is valuable, but it's something you have to make yourself, and this applies on the individual as well as the collective level. The "moral arc of the universe" does not adjust itself.

Personally, I've promised myself a road trip when the pandemic fades. I think we all need something like that, otherwise it feels like there really is no future.

I lack optimism wrt global politics and the near future environment. I am hopeful there is a far future environment in which there is room and cause for optimism.
I am optimistic that scientific advances will continue to help with a lot of shit wrt disease and famine and I'm cynical enough to know that small gains will be always pressured by greedy bastards.
I think we're on a very bumpy ride but heading mostly in the right direction wrt race, sex and gender politics and rights - depending how wide you set your lens.

I am a white, straight man and have a job and money so my outlook on all of the above will have some optimism bias built in.

The idea that these attitudes are defense mechanisms is interesting and there's certainly something to it. I see it as being almost even more basic, though. They're like an instinctual effect of our minds constantly reaching for patterns in the world.

I try to be optimistic about everything except pop music.

Best thing imo.

Fwiw I’m still more optimistic about pop music than most poptimists are about non-pop.

I’mma stop derailing this thread now.

sorry, folks, your acknowledgement of the world getting steadily worse with every day is just a defense mechanism, it's your fault for thinking it

Christ

For anyone struggling in the current environment, all signs point to the future only getting worse.

Social and financial insulation against the coming disruptions should probably hold out for the next class up for another generation or two, though, so maybe we'll perfect fusion by then and carbon capture and things will smooth out a bit.

Maybe we’ll just all learn to share!

increasingly convinced that people who "would rather feel hopeful now and disappointed later" have never actually experienced said disappointment, because anyone who has experienced it should know how much it outweighs and how completely it obliterates anything that came before, and how much suffering could be avoided if it wasn't brought about

I think speculation about whether anyone has ever had it bad or as bad as person X otherwise they would definitely agree with person X is probably not my experience of how people work

I'm personally reasonably optimistic for someone who is personally going backwards financially due to cost of living growing at a pace faster than my wage increases. I don't mind being broke that much, kind of resigned to it, think I might just about be able to spring struggling through having a kid with my wife which is what we're looking to do in the next few years. I also just quit drinking and that feels like a positive change.

politically I'm absolutely blackpilled and find it kind of gut-wrenching to experience people who earnestly think any political project is going to make things better. been thinking recently about how I'd love to be able to go back to catholicism and have that belief again (haven't since I was a kid) because there's sure as shit nothing positive in the temporal - outside of the immediately personal - to cling to

Not everyone has the same brain as you

Xp

It occurs to me that I have felt somewhat more pessimistic about my personal life during the past few years (nothing drastic, mostly just getting older and feeling less sure about my place in the world), and perhaps that has meant that I have turned to the world at large as a potential source of optimism, rather than doing the work to find it closer to home.

Optimism and pessimism are really just two sides of the same confirmation bias coin when you come right down to it.

Political activism never feels like it’s enough and it’s thankless and exhausting but it sure as hell makes more of a positive difference in the long run than religious quietism.

Not everyone has the same brain as you

Agreed, but just one x so I assumed it was aimed at deems?

it wouldn't even be in the top 100 worst things that have been said to me

here, that is

increasingly convinced that people who "would rather feel hopeful now and disappointed later" have never actually experienced said disappointment, because anyone who has experienced it should know how much it outweighs and how completely it obliterates anything that came before, and how much suffering could be avoided if it wasn't brought about

There are different levels of disappointment, though. I mean, when I posted that, I was thinking specifically of being disappointed by political decisions. Some disappointing political decisions might be felt as gut punches, while others are more like, "Ah well, I wish it had gone another way." It depends on how much you're invested, and what's at stake.

I mean, 2020 alone has been one long ongoing continuous gut punch, the reasons either being explicitly political or implicitly so (COVID being made worse by the non-response). if anything the takeaway from 2020 should be that not even the most extreme pessimists predicted how bad things would get

For anyone struggling in the current environment, all signs point to the future only getting worse.

Social and financial insulation against the coming disruptions should probably hold out for the next class up for another generation or two, though, so maybe we'll perfect fusion by then and carbon capture and things will smooth out a bit.

― onlyfans.com/hunterb (milo z), Tuesday, December 1, 2020 7:08 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Maybe we’ll just all learn to share!

― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, December 1, 2020 7:08 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pessimism has better lols

Political activism never feels like it’s enough and it’s thankless and exhausting but it sure as hell makes more of a positive difference in the long run than religious quietism.

― pomenitul, Tuesday, December 1, 2020 11:16 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fp'd

http://www.worldwisdom.com/uploads/artists/35.jpg

I did say ‘sure as hell’ tho.

my real answer to this question is that, for me, pessimism and optimism collapsed a long time ago into "everything just is - absurd, fascinating, unimaginably cruel, unimaginably beautiful, unstable from moment to moment and completely predictable over time - and also i got to keep paying the bills"

I'm realizing that mosh pits were doing a lot of the lifting when I successfully got through the fecal avalanche of daily life.

My personal life and circumstances are OK, though they could definitely be better, however I don't see anything to be optimistic about life in the UK in the foreseeable future at all.

FWIW, I actually do acknowledge that the world is getting steadily worse with each passing day. To be honest, that seems like objective reality to me. But I don't think it inevitable that there will be a continued decline into an irreversible collapse, or that there aren't things to be hopeful about in spite of larger trends.

Map otm I think

If you polled, say, Chinese citizens on whether "things are steadily getting worse", I wonder how the results would differ from US and Europe's.

Map otm 2nded

Ah yes, nothing says a serious consideration quite like “other people have it worse, shut the fuck up.”

I don't think it's inevitable, but I also don't think it's impossible, which seems to be the sticking point; as I see it, we're also at a point when it is going to take exponentially increasing amounts of effort to change course (both large-scale, like climate change, and smaller-scale, like cruelty becoming increasingly default), that nobody wants to even start on

my real answer to this question is that, for me, i'm optimistic about your mom

map otm

Hey gyac maybe ask someone to elaborate before deciding you know what they were "really" saying

I did ask you upthread on another matter but you didn’t seem to want to answer.

I'm like a congenital mope but I still somehow generally trend toward optimism for some reason, I dunno.

I find, increasingly, that excursions into history are a great curative for chronic pessimism about the world today. Like, some of the shit what happened in the past was diiiiiire in ways few of us could barely comprehend. Things might stink right now in a variety of ways but it's often the comparative difference between a whiff of BO and having your face mashed into a dumpster full of month-old hamburger.

everything just is - absurd, fascinating, unimaginably cruel, unimaginably beautiful, unstable from moment to moment and completely predictable over time

Isn't this from the final voiceover from American Beauty?

(plastic bag flops about on the breeze)

I often wonder if there isn't something off abt the optimism/pessimism tags as applied to the ongoing realpolitik vs (soft?) revolution debate in the pol threads.

Proponents of the latter are often called pessimistic w/r/t the status quo when in fact they may ben just as optimistic, but about novel avenues of change that aren't readily available.

Similarly, the former often lay claim to a pragmatism which itself sometimes seems born out of pessimism....

That's a good point. The part I struggle with is "optimistic, but about novel avenues of change that aren't readily available" because I rarely see those avenues of change discussed in any substantive way.

Like, I would like to share that optimism, so convince me!

my real answer to this question is that, for me, i'm optimistic about your mom

map otm

― mookieproof, Tuesday, December 1, 2020 7:43 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

high five

your mom v much like optimism, she's always looking up (at me)