Pessimism

Notes

When we are wearing dark-colored glasses, no wonder everything looks bleak. The way we view the world affects how we experience it. We tune ourselves to negativity which captures most of our attention, and then becomes a Negative cycle because we only consume harmful information, which leads us to isolate ourselves further from others, which increases the suffering and negativity in our lives. Garbage in garbage out.

Pessimism as opposed to Optimism means that we give more of our attention to negative things. We believe that the future will be worse, or that there is nothing we can do to change it. Pessimism often leads to Helplessness because why even bother if we can't do anything, or even if we try then other people, god, luck or nature would ruin it for us. It can also lead to Depression because the negativity eats us from within, it can crowd out any feelings of happiness and meaning.

So why are we pessimistic? Pessimism is "helpful" because it gives us the illusion of control. We imagine the worst possible scenario, because if we can handle that, we could handle everything. It reduces Uncertainty. If the worst happen, we were "always right", "we saw it coming", we weren't caught off guard.

Visual

Overview

🔼Topic:: Mindset (MOC) ↩️Origin:: 🔗Link::