bigmrpig wrote:I'm talking, "My team's really good, there's no way they can lose this game" and "My team never wins. They won't win this one."
So which is better? I find that optimists are often often disappointed. It's hard to thoroughly celebrate a victory you knew would occur as thoroughly as if it's unexpected, and seemed almost a futile cause.
So is it really all that bad to be a pessimistic person? Is being optimistic just as disappointing? Does it all depend on the situation? Is just looking at the most realistic outcome the best way to live your life?
I wish I could provide a link to a study I remember from a couple of years ago. It turns out that optimistic people tend to have better luck than pessimistic people. The experiment went something like this: a group of people were asked to come to an office. There is only one way to get to the office from the parking lot, so everyone has to pass through the same walkway. People were given different times over a certain number of weeks so that only one person at a time was going to the office at any given time. On that walkway was hidden a $100 bill in one place or another.
I don't have the figures, but the optimists found the bill consistently more often than the pessimists did. The speculation is that optimists are constantly looking for ways in which the world confirms their own optimism, and so are looking out for good things to happen, and recognizing them when they do. The pessimists, however, have already accepted that the world is a nasty place and that there's nothing they can do about it, so they don't pay attention as much.
I think your example of the ideal optimist is a little flawed because an optimist would not have very many extreme lows if things did not work out well. An optimist would see the good in the bad situation, even if the bad situation was unexpected. In this way, the optimist is better able to weather bad times because s/he can see past the immediate bad to the overall good. For example, the optimist, upon not being offered a job he thought he was perfect for, could reason that a company that could not recognize his potential would not be a good company to work for. The pessimist in the same situation could reason that there is something wrong with him because his ideal job was something he was not suited for, and he would get discouraged from applying to other similar jobs. The problem for each is in assuming the motives of the recruiter for not hiring him. That is, in each case, the rejected job seeker has in some sense
already made up his mind about what to think if the job is not offered even before the interview.
The preconception of how and what to think about a given situation leads to erroneous confirmation of one's own beliefs, because they amount to rationalization. In my view, the universe is effectively random, except as humans define and affect it. This means that neither a pessimistic nor optimistic viewpoint makes any sense. Things just are. And to the extent that you can change things, you can hope and plan and protect and fear, but to stay on one side or the other is mistaking
happenstance for
intent.
