Pessimism over Optimism
Published May 17th, 2007Those of you who know me know that I have the bizarre skill of being generally pleasant to be around even though I haven’t seen the bright side of a situation since…well…uh….I have no analogy here. Since ever. I’m just far too good at seeing what can go wrong, by the time I try to see what could go right - whatever has happened has happened. But that’s OK, since I was probably prepared for it to go wrong anyway. If it goes right, then who cares? Pessimists are always prepared for the worst and surprised by the best, optimists are always prepared for the best and otherwise screwed. You dont need a contingency plan for when things go right.
So the new self-help wave sweeping the nation, thanks to the Oprahjuggernaut, is The Secret. What is The Secret? It’s not particularly groundbreaking. It’s basically positive thinking. If you think positively, positive things will happen. If you act like you already have love or money, love or money will find you. That’s The Secret. Positive thinking is fine, but too much - really buying into the belief that everything will be fine as long as you assume it is fine - is incredibly dangerous. People with no concept of balance are taking The Secret too far, and Oprah should stop promoting it. Should have these over-zealous folks come on and explain to them the problem. Slate’s John Gravois really spells this out in his latest column.
It all comes down to the fact that humans tend to ignore a problem that they can’t see in favor of believing no problems are here now, so none will ever arise.
A glance at a few statistics shows that most of us see just what we want. In a national survey of parents by the Public Agenda organization, a hefty majority said their child never stays out too late, never uses bad language, never wears sloppy or revealing clothes, and never does poorly in school. Only a third of American sunbathers use sunscreen, and Californians are almost twice as likely to play the lottery as they are to buy earthquake insurance.
Yeah. See, that’s a problem. I’ll be writing a little more on this in a couple days. But suffice it to say, positive thinking, blindly, is just bad!
Take NASA, for example, which ignored repeated warnings from its engineers in advance of the Challenger explosion because it was so busy envisioning a perfect blastoff. Or the FBI, which turned a blind eye to a memo from its Phoenix office in the summer of 2001—a memo suggesting that al-Qaida was using local flight schools to infiltrate the civil aviation system. Or the Bush administration, which has been roundly condemned for planning the Iraq war around a set of best-case scenarios. (What do you think The Secret folks would say about Iraq? “We will be greeted as liberators” was good, but “Mission Accomplished” was even better. Visualize, guys, visualize!) A little negative thinking might have gone a long way in all those situations.
All good points. If you really, really need to figure out as many bad scenarios as possible in order to avoid them, you should - don’t avoid thinking about them. That’s a recipe for disasters. There are stories of people stopping their cancer treatments, trying to cure themselves with positive thinking. It’s madness. Trying to see the bright side of things is one thing, but assuming things are great and will be great because you assume they’re going to be great? That’s delusional. Slate’s Emily Yoffe gave it a shot - and I’d say her results weren’t all that special. One interesting blog I read really boiled down the book, looking for any truth - but couldn’t find it. Just because you wish things won’t make it so. Otherwise I’d be a billionaire with a hot, loving wife and a pet dinosaur. I may achieve those things on my own, but not because I sat around believing I’d already accomplished it.
The only people The Secret really works for are those who are so delusional they deny what’s going on around them, and the creators of The Secret. Everyone else stands to be disappointed. There are many different ways to examine yourself and improve yourself - but they all take work. No free lunch people. I work hard to find faults to correct them, I don’t avoid it. But then again, it’s said that IT workers see faults first - it’s in their nature to be fixing things constantly.
But maybe that’s just me being a pessimist.
I haven’t read The Secret and I don’t know anything about it past what you said above so this might not have anything to do with it.
Positive thinking doesn’t necessarily have to involve self delusion. I think having a positive outlook on one’s circumstances and things outside of one’s control can lead to a happier life. Its the “glass is half full” versus the “glass is half empty” attitude. A person shouldn’t ignore negative consequences of their actions but they shouldn’t dwell on the negative aspects of their current situation either. If all you think about is negativity then you’re not going to be a happy person, and I think happiness is the true measure of a person’s quality of life; not money, fame, power or prestige. What good are those if you don’t enjoy them.
The Secret is above and beyond positive thinking, it really is. It’s self-help mumbo-jumbo, mysticism for the desperate. I’m serious.
And what people misunderstand about my “pessimism” - it’s not that others see the glass as half full, and I see it as half empty. Others see the glass half full, but I just want to point out that it might be a hot day and half a glass may not be enough water!
Or the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
Or you could just be sick and tired of having water all the time.
my friend gave me a copy of the dvd before it made it’s way on to oprah. it is pretty cheesy in a history channel documentary sort of way, if you ever want to watch it to see what it actually is, let me know!
jennifer