July 23, 2008

Comments (7)

  • I dunno. Sounds kinda emo to me. To me, nothing is a wasted effort if it’s in regard to choosing a more optimistic stance in life. Why is that “wasted”? (How pessimistic of you.)

    And why would that not be a good goal? If you weren’t necessarily pre-dispositioned for optimism (I, happily, am), then wouldn’t you need to learn to “achieve” optimism by means of goals (if that’s what it took, and being optimistic really meant THAT much to you)?

  • The question carries assumptions that are untrue, as does your answer.

    The state of optimism doesn’t gain you anything. It just means you’re optimistic. Trying to maintain optimism for its own sake is fruitless because most outcomes aren’t determined by your optimism.
    It’s a bit like the US economy: We’re toast. We’ll be toast for a while. At best, being optimistic about it doesn’t help one way or the other. At worst, being optimistic allows us to gloss over real problems that need to be fixed, and leave them unchanged. So should optimism be our goal? I say no.

  • Another example: Xanga comment formatting will always be fucked up. There is no reason to be optimistic that it will ever work right. Rational optimism is called ‘hope.’ Irrational optimism is called ‘faith.’ I have neither hope nor faith that Xanga will ever work right in this regard. Surveys work flawlessly, as do ads. Comment formatting is another thing entirely, and if I were a hair more paranoid, I’d offer that the Xanga ghods have inserted code into their system that finds me and messes up the formatting of my comments on purpose, just so I’ll write long stupid comments like this one complaining about how stupid Xanga is.

  • I’m in agreement here.. optimism should be a part of the means, but never the end.

  • Whatever a person does to be more optimistic, he’ll only fail. So why bother to try?

  • I’m not sure how you change something like that, and if you’re forcing it, would you actually be optimistic?  Or would it be more like saying cheese instead of smiling?

  • soobee’s ‘cheese’ simile(?) is so apt it made me smile. You are correct though, Homie, in pointing out the weakness of the question. Economic systems and markets do, however, buy and sell ‘faith’, bullishness’, whatever, and the function of optimism on wall-street has been documented as nauseum. (I actually graph my optimism-quotient at 7:00 AM each morning. (I’m trying to assess its relevance to success or failure in my earthly pursuits).

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