Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I'm an optimist. My husband is my exact opposite .. the pessimist. We've been happily married for almost 15 years.I hate that he's a pessimist. However, it's what balances us. It's funny because I grew up abused, poor ... ect. I survived by always looking at things I can control and never losing hope. He was raised with a silver spoon. Hope is the greatest force on Earth. The positive energy that we put out, comes back to us. By facing each challenging day with a smile and hope .. you share that with others. As long as you are realistic and not on drugs =) there is no harm in looking at the bright side of life. If anything it has proven to help you and others around you .. far more than you think. What's going to happen in your life, is going to happen. You might as well make the best of it and turn lemons into lemon-aid.
The real danger, is that while spreading the Gospel of 'Optimism', the self-aggrandising optimists turn failing wannabe's into self-loathers, because in spite of their best efforts to be optimistic, they fail to attain their goals and accept the judgement of the self-aggrandisers that their failure is because they're not trying hard enough.
Heh, yeah, optimism as a self-reported pyramid scheme. This is similar to military valor and heroism. The survivors are the ones who propagate those values. Didn't work out so well for the dead ones.
In the common sense view, being optimistic will probably increase ones chances of success where there is competition involved. If one does not try then one will not get. One can caveat that assertion to exclude unrealistic optimism, but that aside I think it holds true.
However, what I find irritating about the 'think positive' mantra is that I often see it preached from on high by people seeking to self-aggrandise. Let me explain what I mean after a slight but necessary aside.
So I saw this great TED video, and in it the speaker was reporting the findings of controlled studies his department had been running. One of those studies involved pairs of participants playing against each other in rigged games of Monopoly. Prior to the game, a coin toss determined which player would play as the "Rich" guy, and which player would play as the "Poor" guy. The rich players started with three times as much cash, they got more moves around the board and they collected more money each time they passed 'Go'.
The finding of this study which I found most amusing/depressing (simultaneously), was that when asked why they inevitably "won" the game, many of the "Rich" players primarily attributed their success to their own decisions in the game. This demonstrates exactly the annoying part of the human psyche that I'm alluding to, because the 'Winners' would have needed to be improbably unlucky, or completely retarded, to have lost. Their success was down to the coin-toss, not their own behaviour. Hold this thought.
Going back to optimism, there is almost like an optimism 'cult' which seems to dominate self-help books. Now I fully concede that an optimistic (whilst still realistic) outlook will almost certainly help people achieve goals like better employment, or better exam results etc. I'm not challenging the genuine assistance that this method provides to a great many people.
However, there are some adherents to the "Cult" of optimism who take this principle too far and can cause harm as a result. The problem (as I see it) is that some people often attribute their own successes to the supposed strengths of their character, just like the rigged Monopoly players, rather than realising that the metaphorical 'coin toss' was the primary factor in their success. The danger is that 'Optimism' turns into a weapon that this successful minority use to simultaneously self-aggrandise themselves, and put others down in the process.
e.g. "I got my well paying job/super-model girlfriend/McMansion by thinking positively and using the 10 step process! If you don't have a well paying job/super-model girlfriend/McMansion, then you're just not trying hard enough to think positively."
The problem with this kind of assertion (and this forum's spattered in it) is that there aren't enough well-paying jobs (nevermind actual jobs), super-models or McMansion's to fill the demand for everyone who wants one. (Apologies to any super-models reading this who I've just objectified, but you're probably used to it by now.) It's just not practically possible for everyone who wants one to have one, regardless of how optimistic, positive or driven that they feel.
The real danger, is that while spreading the Gospel of 'Optimism', the self-aggrandising optimists turn failing wannabe's into self-loathers, because in spite of their best efforts to be optimistic, they fail to attain their goals and accept the judgement of the self-aggrandisers that their failure is because they're not trying hard enough.
None of this is a criticism of 'Optimism' unto itself; rather the manner in which it is sometimes [ab]used for the purposes of self-aggrandisement and blaming others for matters outwith their control.
Optimism has many downsides. People gloss over the evil in people, the unpredictability of the future, the decline of our culture, and a host of other problems. Optimism causes one to not look reality in the face, and so people make foolish decisions rather than taking a realistic examination of the present situation, and make a prognosis of the future based on the current direction of the way things are going.
B. Ehrenreich has had something to say about this. The name of her book gives some indication of the direction her research led: "Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America." In the UK marketed as, "Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World."
I found it an interesting read. It is close to many of the views in this thread, and supported by research too.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
