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.

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)