Pessimism And Optimism Revisited

Let me ask you two questions, first, what is your greatest achievement and second, what is your greatest failure?  Take a moment to think about these questions and come up with an answer before you read on. 

Whatever the answers were that you came up with for the most part are irrelevant, those questions were not asked to praise or belittle those extremes but rather to position you to answer a third question - which question was easier to answer?  The answer to this question reveals more about you than the answers you gave to the first two because the answer to this question is a good indicator of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

For the longest time I accepted the definition of optimism and pessimism as being a person in the former who expects the best outcome and a person in the latter being someone who expects the worst outcome.  I even dedicated several posts over the years to this subject and the distinction between the two, but recently I've come to define these two terms in a different way.

What I have come to realise is that optimism and pessimism can actually be defined more succinctly in terms of happiness, or to be more precise, where your happiest moment in your life will be.  An optimist projects their happiest moment to be in the future, not yet achieved, something to work towards whereas a pessimist holds happiness in retrospect, deeming their happiest moment to be in their past.  That doesn't mean that a pessimist is incapable of achieving greater moments of happiness but simply that they do not expect to have those experiences and that any new experience which will become their happiest moment won't be recognised as such until after that experience has taken place.

You could also infer from this that an optimist lives for the future, and that a pessimist lives in the past, but then who lives in the present?  Surprisingly I think the answer to that question is the cynic because cynicism is by definition a method of interpreting the world in the moment based on prejudice and scepticism or to put it more bluntly they judge the world constantly.  These three philosophical concepts whilst they may seem rigid should be recognised as negative by their definition, which at first might provoke disbelief, the idea of optimism being inherently negative seems like an oxymoron at first but when you frame it in the context of your consciousness it becomes apparent that optimism is a distraction as much as pessimism and cynicism are because all three are about displacing your consciousness.  You are removed from the present and placed into a third person perspective in all three cases, one looking to the past, one to the present, and one to the future.

This raises the question of scales, if we believe that every action has an equal and opposite reaction then we can create a scale for every action that bridges the two, even if this scale only permits two values of 1 and -1.  You then have to take each of these concepts and consider what their true opposites are if not those we have already outlined.

If we define pessimism as finding your happiest moment in your past, then finding your most unhappiest moment there too could arguably be defined as the opposing concept, there is no word that exists to specifically identify this behaviour so I am taking a word here that means something else but fits the narrative I have created, that word is 'traumatism' where the existing definition refers the development of trauma, in this context I am extending that definition to include the act of identifying moments as traumatic.

If we define cynicism as the displacement of the consciousness in the moment causing us to judge the experience rather than experience it for ourselves, then the opposing concept here would be the act of living in the moment without thinking about it - in psychology this is referred to as mindfulness or raising your awareness.  Again to fit the narrative I have created, the word I would use to describe this mentality would be 'sporadicism' which I would define quite close to sporadism and sporadicity which are adjectives used to describe someone or something that is sporadic and unpredictable. 

That leaves the future perspective, where optimism is the act of defining your happiest moment as something yet to occur, the opposite here would be defining your darkest moment as something yet to occur which again has a word used to describe it, 'neuroticism' which in turn serves as an identifier for most psychologists of the likelihood that certain disorders may develop that are associated with increasingly negative outlooks on the world, sometimes caused by cognitive processes and sometimes caused by neurological conditions.

To summarise:

Past:
Pessimism - your happiest moment is behind you
Traumatism - your worst moment happened in your past

Present:
Cynicism - judging the world and displacing your consciousness from it
Sporadicism - living in the moment without thinking about it at all

Future:
Optimisim - your happiest moment is yet to come
Neuroticism - your worst moment is yet to come

What I have realised through developing this classification system is that cynicism creates negative experiences which reinforce trauma and increase the likelihood of developing neurotic tendencies, and that sporadicism creates a mixture or positive and negative experiences which can rebalance your time-line.  The more positive experiences that are created in the moment that in turn contribute to your past as you create it, lessen the impact and the magnitude of trauma reducing the likelihood of developing neurotic tendencies and creating space for optimism.

Ultimately the present is the only one of the three periods of time you can actually control, the divide between pessimism and optimism is therefore irrelevant.  The only relevant question is whether you want to judge the present or engage with it, whichever you choose will feed your inclination towards pessimism or optimism in the long run, so whilst you can't abandon a pessimist or optimist mentality completely in the moment, you can steer yourself down a path that will eventually change that mentality.