Why Optimism Always Wins

“It is easy to be a pessimist, it is an easy trap to fall into but it implies that humans are not creative, it doesn’t acknowledge all the ways that we have innovated our way out of previous traps.”- Naval Ravikant.

There is a certain way reality hits you once you get into young adulthood. I am talking about probably your mid-twenties just after the initial exuberance of becoming an adult wanes and life’s realities hit. Success is not coming at the pace you thought it would even after you did everything right. You finished school with good grades and you are just not getting it right. It can get demoralizing, your initial optimism dwindling at the reality that life is dealing you.

It happened to me, I put myself out there, got my first job fast except I was there for longer than I thought and I was at my second job for even far longer. The reality of life dawning. I thought after a couple of tries, things would balance but it was just getting started.

Then I thought, maybe I have been too optimistic, maybe life wasn’t mine for the taking after all. For the first time, I started to contemplate that I might not achieve my dreams. Pessimism must be a better approach to life and it’s issues, maybe if I quit being optimistic, I can manage the sucker punches better. I only spiraled, things were not getting continuously better.

What I discovered was that pessimists are only afraid of being disappointed over and over again. But what they fail to understand is that you begin to act out of fear.

Psychlogyiresearchnet.com says “individuals who experience adversity while pursuing a particular goal reassess the situation and the likelihood of success. This reassessment could lead to the identification of additional resources or alternative approaches to attaining the goal, or to abandoning the goal entirely. Optimists, who are more likely than pessimists to expect that they will be successful in achieving their goals, tend to persist in pursuit of their goals, despite adversity.”

You need to instead accept that you are afraid to fail, know that it is okay to fail sometimes. You need to be able to accept that disappointment is part of life, accepting disappointment doesn’t mean that you only expect failure, it means that even if you fail or life throws you under, you know that it is life, there is no deliberate or concerted effort to see you fail, you know that sometimes it just takes longer for some people than others and surely you’ll get there.

Abigail Williams further explains that, “true optimists don’t mind failure. When life knocks them down, they get right back up and try again. Optimists know that things won’t always go their way, but they don’t expend energy anticipating negative outcomes.”

I have tried optimism, pessimism, and optimism again and I can tell you, I’ll choose optimism any time, any day.

The truth is that you cannot self-loathe your way out of your current situation.