Is optimism really the way forward?

People will tell you (including my mother) that it is much better to be optimistic about life than it is to be pessimistic. If you are optimistic then good things will happen. Think positive. You reap what you sow. What you think is what you get.

Now as nice an ethos as this is, I can't help but question whether this is actually the case. Can we really affect the things that happen just be altering our mental attitude? I joke amongst my friends that I am a pessimist rather than an optimist, but upon deeper reflection I'm actually more of a que sera sera girl and no amount of altering of attitudes will affect how things pan out.

I have a good friend who is a huge believer in Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) and will champion the merits of believing good things will happen and that positivism breeds positive things. I'm not against this per se but just lately I have had a few pleasant things happen to me out of the blue with no prior forethought to actively making these things happen.

I found a funny quote on the Internet the other day which read that the upside of being a pessimist is that you are either constantly being proven right or are pleasantly surprised. I don't want to create the impression that I am a misery guts or anything because I am not but if I was asked to choose between optimism or pessimism I would probably lean towards pessimism simply because it seems to require less effort, and frankly, I suspect the end result will be the same anyhow.

Let me demonstrate with some examples. I have recently had to hand in two large pieces of work for my course and ever since we were first given the assignments, the importance of 'writing at Masters level' and 'being critical' was banged into us at every opportunity. This scared the life out of me and I didn't really feel like I knew what I was doing, and was convinced that I would spectacularly fail the assignments. I didn't. I got distinctions on both of them to my absolute shock (and pleasure of course!).

I broke up with my long term partner last year and spent a good few months wallowing in something akin to self-pity/pessimism, thinking I was destined to die alone, no-one would ever want to be with me, I'm a crap person etc etc. But I was persuaded* by friends and family to have a go at Internet dating, which by the way I was very sceptical about. It turns out that even with this sceptical, pessimistic attitude and not really that much effort on my part, I have come into contact with some really lovely people who seem to like me for me. Which is awesome.

So the question that is begging to be asked in my head is this: if you think positive things and have a highly optimistic attitude in order to allow good things to happen, then what's going on with this good stuff happening in my life?  I have come to the conclusion that you can't actually affect the things that will happen in your life through optimism (if this was the case then I'm sure some company would have pounced on this by now and be selling optimism on the Web at highly inflated prices), but maybe optimists have a better time whilst waiting for life to unfold.

Personally I think the beauty of life is that you don't know what's coming up - good or bad - and that the best way to deal with whatever life throws at you is with a 'let's see what happens' attitude. Oh, and a healthy dose of cynicism for good measure. ;)



*For persuaded read 'bullied'.