Last night on the Daily show Jon Stewart interviewed a man who had written a book (Half-Empty) on how “pessimists” have the same quality of life and length of life as optimists.
Now at first I was a little rebuffed by this, since all my research shows that happy people are healthier, have a better quality of life and live longer than not-so-happy people.
Then I realized my mistake. Happiness is not the opposite of pessimism, although I was making it so in my head.
Pessimism is the opposite of optimism, yes, and practicing optimism is one of the ways to build happiness, yes, but optimism in and of itself is not happiness and there are MANY ways to happiness.
It occurs to me now that some people might be very happy being pessimists. So in effect this man’s findings could be true. As long as the people studied were happy in their pessimism or optimism (or equally not happy in either) then the results would show no big difference in the quality of life.
That said, here is my own two cents on why I don’t promote pessimism.
The simple reason is, in general if you focus on negative thing and outcomes, that is what you will find, and for many people this leads to decreased happiness. Yes it is true that some people might get joy out of expecting and receiving a negative outcome: “Yay, things did work out the way I thought they would – horribly!”
But for the most part I believe that pessimism will lead to less happiness because of always seeing the negative sides of things. I think it would be difficult to maintain “high spirits” with a negative world view. Obviously the man last night was an exception to this, as he seemed to be in very high spirits despite having had cancer and working towards beating it and despite what he claims as a negative world view.
To me that just shows that you can find happiness in very unexpected places, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to advocate those places. I know things that work, scientifically, and chances are, even if this fellow wasn’t practicing optimism he was probably using one of the other methods to achieve happiness – perhaps working towards and achieving his goals (having just written and published this new book).
So there you have it. Happiness comes in all shapes and sizes and forms. This does mesh with one of my views of the world, which is that everyone is different and what works for me probably won’t work for you in the same way.
So use your Awareness, and do some self-discovery to find out what works for you, and chances are – you’ll be a bit happier.
Until the next time, keep laughing, and finding happiness wherever you can.