The advantages of pessimism

[Skybird]

Now you are about to learn why I am always that infinite bubbling fountaion of bad news and negative assessment - it'S because I feel happier that way!



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14506129

If Pascal's pessimism can effectively console us, it may be because we are usually cast into gloom not so much by negativity as by hope. It is hope - with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians and our planet - that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us.
(...)
We should honour Pascal, and the long line of pessimistic writers to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state. This is not a stance with which the modern world betrays much sympathy, for one of its dominant characteristics and - in my opinion - its greatest flaw is its optimism.
Despite occasional moments of panic, most often connected to market crises, wars or pandemics, the secular contemporary world maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement, based on a quasi-messianic faith in the three great drivers of change - science, technology and commerce.
Material improvements since the mid-18th Century have been so remarkable and have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth and power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic - and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content.

[flatsixes]

Material improvements since the mid-18th Century have been so remarkable and have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth and power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic - and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content.

I'd be curious to know how many pessimists were responsible for those "remarkable" and "exponential" increases to "our comfort, safety, wealth and power." Optimists create. Pessimists criticize. Opportunists sue them both.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by flatsixes

I'd be curious to know how many pessimists were responsible for those "remarkable" and "exponential" increases to "our comfort, safety, wealth and power." Optimists create. Pessimists criticize. Opportunists sue them both.

Optimism needs to be balanced by realism, else it creates easily as much damage and suffering like pessimism that degernartes into fatalism and passivity.
when i still counceled people occaisonbally, and also mentored people who I trained in meditation, I time and time again ran into their paramount expectations for a positive future being the source of their dissapointements, or losses. If you always paint an image of the rebightrest of all possible futures, you necessarily need to ghet destroyed, because that kind of perfection simply is not within man'S reach. The greater your hopes, the deeper and the more likely your fall and despair, inevitably.

Some religions also point at this truth. The article mentions Christianity in this context. I would add Buddhism.

The problem also is known in psychotherapy. It could be entitled as "How to safely frustrate yourself". The trick is to have expectations for perfection - in looks, chances, outcomes, procedural goings, events unfolding.

I dare say that pessimists get more often positively surprised than optimists.

[flatsixes]

I'm not a psychologist, but equating "optimism" with the pursuit of "perfection" seems to me, at least) to be a rhetorical trap. Optimists seek to improve on existing circumstances working within the realm of possibilities (a plane which "perfection" cannot exist). A better mousetrap. A speedier way to communicate. A cure for AIDS. The optimist believes that these things can be fashioned from the application of knowledge and available resources. After a discouraging result, the optimist goes back to the drawing board and tries again, and again, and again. Sure, fail at something long enough and you might become pessimistic about your chances for success, but that's not the fault of optimism, that's the failure of hubris (see, e.g.: practice of alchemy).

[Skybird]

You look at it a bit one-sided.

For it often is the case that optimists ignore warnings of the future, and then get "surprised" by it, or they may keep on doing things the same way again and again and again and again and accepting the costs for sticking to these repeatedly misled "solutions" becoming irresponsibly high (just think of the current crisis), or they optimistically stick to a project's goal while never questioning the project they are busy with.

I think you intentionally try to misunderstand what the author of that article is pointing at.

In the end, when I do not expect to win in the loottery, I cannot be disappointed, but only get positvely surprised. If I take a win optimistically as granted, then I will get frustrated probably every time I tip some numbers.

One can be carried away by optimism and entzusiasm, for exampe when going to war. Bad preparation and understimation of the enemy is the result (we have seen it twice in the past ten years, eh?) But if you expect the worst, neither the grim nature of war nor the enemy can surprise you, fo you will have planned and prepared as best as you could.

And so on and on.

Hope for the best, expect the worst, and never forget that hope is no strategy.

I mthink that much of today'S lack of discipline in many ylo87nge rpeo9ple, and their lack of tolerance for frustration, comes from living in a climate that always teaches them that the perfect, the successful, the good oujtcome, the reward if you try,m that all this is the norm. But it isn'T.

An American Aikido master, techer and journalist named George Leonard once has written a small booklet he entitled "Mastery. They Keys to Success". The German edition was published under a title that translated from the German would mean: "The Longer Breath. Mastery of the Ordinary". There he describes something that he calls - in the German translation of the book - "plateau-phases". It is the long phases of waiting and apparent standstill that fill most of our lifes, even when we train, prepare, and work for a higher goal, because life is not a constant, linear rise, but it developes in steps: a sudden climb, a jump to the next level, and then: a phase of waiting for the next jump, a phase he calls the plateau-phase.

These plateau phases need patience, and discipline to continue preparing despite the appoarent standstill, and tolerance for frustration, because if we expect action every day and success to be an immediate reaction to a trigger we just have switched, we will be frustrated very often - becasue life most of the time does not work this way. The way to run it over the entire distance is to have longer breath than the plateau phase is lasting, waiting for the right moment - and then jump to the next level. You need optimism to dare the jump. And you need frustration tolerance to wait for the chance, and use the time for preparation even if it seems to be "in vein", since nothing happens.

It is a cute little booklet. I recommend it. It can serve as an intellectually very pointy cure to the short awarenerss spans our modern media and job world is plagued with.

You wonder what all this has to do with optimism, and why I bvring it up? Just look at the wayxs they so far have tried to adress the financial crisia and economy crisis. It should be self-explanatory. The system does not get questioned. Sopme measures of the old pattern get tried again and again, chnages are expoected to set in immediately. Longterm costs of doing like this get ignored. Hope replaces realism, hope for that if one tries this way long and often enough, everything will be good again, and that the system will heal itself.


What we need on these issues, is pessimism. Only that will teach us how to look at it all realistically, and planning for a longtermed cure - instead of expecting immediate miracles.

You see, lacking patience is what often perceives realism as "pessimism". Where as "optimism" often expresses an expectation of guarenteed success or immediate reaction. People not only want it all - they want it now. Right? Right.

[Skybird]

P.S. Found it. I see the author seems to be no unknown in America, having released quites some books. I did not know that.

http://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-S...3443260&sr=8-1

[Sailor Steve]

"The optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid he might be right."
-Robert A. Heinlein

[August]

I think pessimism is a self defeating mindset. In order to succeed at just about anything in life one must first believe that success is possible.

Folks don't try as hard when they think they're going to fail anyways.

[Skybird]

But is optimism really equal to total conviction of success and something being possible, and is pessimism really equal to total conviction of failure and impossibility?

I do not think so. To me both terms describe a spectrum's two poles, and a slider on that scale that allows to read "realism value".

Set too much up towards optimism, and you do not take into account risks, ideas opposing your hopes, you prepare too lightly, you expect too much, etc. You become unrealistic.

Set too much down towards pessimism, and you hesitate more than you should, you do not even try, you get intimidated not only by what could go wrong but also by not seeing what could go right. Again, you become unrealistic.

However, it is our desires - speaking from perspective of Buddhist philosphy here - that make us suffer. What we desire but do not get, get separated from, get but lose, makes us suffer. No desire, no suffering. Very short formula to summarise it, but in principle that's it.

You have the same in Dante'S Divine Comedy. I have read that the words at the gate to heaven for long time have been quoted wrong, because Dante mixed up his notes. One thought, the words were at the entrance to hell, and they were "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate" - "Let go all hopes those of you who enter here!" (in the meaning of hopelessness and doom, I translate - not very elegant - from the German). It has been shown by now that in fact the scripture reads different by Dante's original intention, and that it is not the gate to hell, but to heaven: "Lasciate ogni speranza, e poi entrate" - "(first) let go all your hopes - and then enter."

And another poet, I forgot for this moment who it was, a famous one it is, put it even better: "Selig ist, wer ohne Wünsche ist, denn er soll königlich überrascht werden.": Blessed is who is without desires, for he will get surprised regally.

I also would set up another context for it all, that is our basic desire to win peace of mind in our life by winning the conviction that our life has meaning and that we are safe in our role in the cosmic show because we have a certain, and sufficient, ammount of control over our fate and what the world and the future will throw at us. I think there is a link to this concpetion of reality bowing in our favour, and optimism, whereas I think there is a link between pessimism and a less antropocentric perceotion of our role in the cosmic show. One could now think about in how far this will effect our waxy of approaching "reality/life/world", and in how far it enables us to perceive our opportunity to learn about the real nature of things, or instead being fascinated and distracted by our idea of how they should be like (to feed our idea that cosmos has reserved a meaning for our own existence inside it). The veil of maya will not be cut by optimism, and not by pessimism, but realism. By no longer seeing things the way we want them, but seeing them as what they really are. To me, this is the essence of meditation, and this is what I have taught the students I had for years: learn to differ between the way we want things to be, and the way things really are.

So, it seems to me there is much more stuff and implications in this little article than what just skims at the obvious surface of the author's arguments.

[Aramike]

I personally go for pragmatism with a bit of cause-and-effect thrown in for good measure.