Optimism

Well Hello, Hello! So it's been a long time, and while I can't pretend I've spent the entire hiatus ruminating deeply, I have thought and developed several opinions that might be interesting to post as blog posts--so I will try to have a long series of blog posts that I pen (type?) in the next weeks.

But, for the topic at hand, a clash of isms. Specifically, optimism and pessimism. So as some of you might know, I'm a very optimistic person. I don't mean that superficially. I'm that type of optimistic person who just. won't. stop. I'm an in-your-face optimist. You tell me you had a bad day, I'll think (if not say outloud) that you had a learning experience. I'll lose twenty dollars, and think that it is probably stimulating the economy. Hell, the Yankees will lose and I figure it will make them hungrier in the next series of games. Yeah, I'm that kind of optimist. In fact, I don't know if there is anyone more optimistic than I am. But being an optimist, I figure there probably is a whole lot of people just as optimistic as I am.

I've always been a fairly optimistic person--as I posted earlier in the "About Me" post with 20 facts about me, I don't remember the last time a song or a night's sleep didn't make things better. But things have gotten to a whole new level of optimism recently. It might have to due with my developing and strengthening "grassroots philosophy" view of the nature of life--in which individuals are largely free to define what has meaning in life. Equipped with such power, it is easy enough to assume that you are largely free to determine whether a given situation is happy or sad. I am not so arrogant or naive to think that my happiness and optimism is fully controllable by me and my thinking (I know biology and chemistry shaped by evolutionary processes greatly shape and limit the ability of my thinking--and I also know I don't have the faintest idea in exactly way the hard sciences do that), however, on a value-level, and thus for all intents and purposes for my conscious thinking, I've begun to think that life is life, situations are situations, and it is largely in my power to decide whether I will be optimistic or pessimistic regarding those situations and my life--and I nearly always choose optimism.

It has gotten to the point recently, however, where hearing pessimism frustrates me, angers me. Why don't people realize they can just be optimistic!? Today, I think I've realized the necessity of pessimism, and hope to be a more reasonable and tolerant optimist in the future.

See just as much as my "philosophy," has strengthened my optimism, I know the fortunate circumstances of my life, in which I have faced relatively very few hardships and tragedies, has insulated and fortified my optimism. But while I have had very little personal contact, it's important not to forget that deeply sad things exist in life. To be completely rigorous (or at least a little rigorous): while I still maintain that individuals can decide what has meaning and therefore to a large extent choose what is happy and sad, I know that there are things that are nearly impossible not to consider sad--because of the ingrained processes of our mind that compels them to be sad and because any value system in which life is valuable necessitates there to be deep sadness in life--simply because a part of life is death, not to mention sickness, poverty, inequity, crime, and heart-break. For all of my optimism, I've lost sight that sad things exist, and sometimes you don't need to try to--sometimes it's jarring to try to--make them positive. I'll end my post there--my first post, I believe, without some uplifting message at the end. How's that for ironic on a post titled optimism.

Word Up,
DK Says