Optimism's a funny thing. Some people swim in the stuff, and succeed in finding a silver lining to every day of their lives. Others keep up the whole "We're all going to die one day" mode for pretty much their entire existence, and for every single proposition they feel the need to butt in and point out the flaws or disagree in some way. You might've noticed in the way I wrote that sentence that I don't best slide with this attitude, and that I find that kind of constant pessimism very unhealthy.
But the question is, where do you place the line between being pessimistic, and realistic?
Thing is, mostly, if someone is doing something stupid or reckless and someone calls them out on it, then that's the sensible thing to do. Like if a friend was all for getting into drugs, it'd be perfectly reasonable to tell them that it would be bad for their health to do so. But somewhere along the line, we have to draw a distinction between being realistic and being just plain, depressingly, defeatistically pessimistic. Sometimes it's a fine line, but generally, the people in the latter category can find all sorts of reasons to complain about everything, and tend to be so negative as to make them difficult to hang around with.
But I didn't title this post "Pessimism", I named it "Optimism", because that's something I wanted to touch upon as well. Optimism is no shortage of a good thing, but sometimes, the question is whether you should be or not. Sometimes there's no reason to be optimistic, it's just a good way of keeping yourself thinking positive. Sometimes, though, we need to open ourselves up to the negative aspects of a situation in order to deal with it properly. If we took the "Oh, we'll be fine, not too many of us will die," attitude to war, then we wouldn't be prepared for what we'd have to deal with. Once again, we have to make a distinction, between morale and blind, ignorant optimism.
So what should be our default attitude? Should we take life in it's stride and worry about the negatives later? Should we measure our tread carefully and cherish the happy moments when they arrive? Should we dwell thoroughly on everything that could go wrong in order to avoid it? Questions I don't have the answer to.
Personally though, between the two extremes of optimism and pessimism, I know which one I'd pick.
~Love Leonidas
P.S. This is my fiftieth blog post <3. Yay :D
But the question is, where do you place the line between being pessimistic, and realistic?
Thing is, mostly, if someone is doing something stupid or reckless and someone calls them out on it, then that's the sensible thing to do. Like if a friend was all for getting into drugs, it'd be perfectly reasonable to tell them that it would be bad for their health to do so. But somewhere along the line, we have to draw a distinction between being realistic and being just plain, depressingly, defeatistically pessimistic. Sometimes it's a fine line, but generally, the people in the latter category can find all sorts of reasons to complain about everything, and tend to be so negative as to make them difficult to hang around with.
But I didn't title this post "Pessimism", I named it "Optimism", because that's something I wanted to touch upon as well. Optimism is no shortage of a good thing, but sometimes, the question is whether you should be or not. Sometimes there's no reason to be optimistic, it's just a good way of keeping yourself thinking positive. Sometimes, though, we need to open ourselves up to the negative aspects of a situation in order to deal with it properly. If we took the "Oh, we'll be fine, not too many of us will die," attitude to war, then we wouldn't be prepared for what we'd have to deal with. Once again, we have to make a distinction, between morale and blind, ignorant optimism.
So what should be our default attitude? Should we take life in it's stride and worry about the negatives later? Should we measure our tread carefully and cherish the happy moments when they arrive? Should we dwell thoroughly on everything that could go wrong in order to avoid it? Questions I don't have the answer to.
Personally though, between the two extremes of optimism and pessimism, I know which one I'd pick.
~Love Leonidas
P.S. This is my fiftieth blog post <3. Yay :D
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