Optimism in Hard Times

I find myself drawn to thinking about optimism recently. I suspect the reflection is a reaction to the many macro disasters that are happening around us. How a small number of people with outsized influence and power are making decisions about how the rest of us will live. People will live or die or suffer because of decisions taken by these few people, who are not talented, or altruistic or compassionate or all that intelligent, but who have got themselves into positions where they can and will cause havoc for millions.

While each of us in our micro life cannot hope to move the dial on this macro awfulness, I do think that keeping an optimistic (or at least a more optimistic than not) stance can help.

For example, we need to be realistic, which means we need to watch and heed the evidence. Things are not all bad or all good but many of us have a default tendency towards one or other end of that scale. So when there is evidence that shows us that a situation is not as bad as we might instinctively feel, we need a sense of optimism to help us see that evidence and believe it. That in turn, will reduce the negative impact on us of the event or situation.

Another aspect of optimism is how we respond to more direct difficulties and challenges; those things that are more within our control than macro or global issues.  Developing the  capacity to optimise our responses when things go wrong is a sign of optimism.

Things go wrong all the time and how we respond to them can influence our overall sense of wellbeing. Optimism can explain the different impact the same situation has on two people. 

One, the more optimistic, will tend to see some opportunity in it, will tend to treat it as a temporary setback in a longer term time scale or try to leverage it to do something worthwhile.

By deploying this type of thinking, the more optimistic of the two people will tend to generate more effective strategies for dealing with and responding when things go wrong.