From my notes on Coursera’s Positive Psychology course: The most recent geological epoch that we lived through, the Pleistocene, was the Ice Ages. Famine, flood, ice, drought, more ice. Now, imagine a primate mentality that thought, “What a lovely day today out there. I bet tomorrow is going to be really lovely as well.” That mentality got crushed by the ice. The mentality that survived, the brains that we have, are bad weather brains. They’re brains that say “looks like a nice day out there, but tomorrow the ice is coming.” And that is the way we process, automatically, information about a good world. Depression, anger, paranoia have served us very well. In the Ice Ages, it was a very good idea to think that bad stuff was coming. But consider the possibility that human progress actually exists, and that prosperity, a good world, living well, not having a tragedy… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Pessimism
Pizza and Pessimism
“There’s a slice of pizza missing,” my son announces. When I got home from work, there were two slices left over from last night. I ate one and left one for him. “I calibrated my appetite for two slices,” he says. “The pessimist,” I say, “sees that there’s one slice missing. The optimist sees that there’s one slice left.” Read more →
Overheard
The Half-Full Glass
I put a half-full cup of soda from Extra Mile in the fridge and went out to run some errands. When I got back home, the soda was gone. “What happened to my soda?” I asked. “I cleaned out the refrigerator,” my wife said. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty and throws it out, even if it belongs to someone else . . . Read more →
Albert Schweitzer was a Bore
An optimist sees a green light everywhere; a pessimist sees only the red light. The truly wise person is colorblind. — Albert Schweitzer A true optimist is a man who can look in a toilet bowl and see only corn. — Ben Greenman Read more →