Third World Writer

I am a pessimist, a skeptic, and maybe something of a cynic as well. I view the world as 80% evil and 20% good, and in the course of an average day I probably spend 70% of my time dwelling on negative things, 10% on positive things, and 20% on neutral. So when people call me a negative person, I can’t really disagree. This world, after all, is such a negative world.

I happen to know a number of happy, positive, optimistic people, and I do concede that they are indeed a more enjoyable bunch to be around. They’re lively, often wear pleasant smiles, and maintain an outlook on life that makes you wish they stayed happy forever. And I, too, once upon a time, was an optimist. I took steps to see the positive side of everything, I rejected thoughts that got me depressed, and I maintained a perspective that showed the world in a positive light. But reality never gave up, and before long I was forced to see sides of it that I had shunned. And as more and more of the world became undeniable, the more I found that I was no longer truly optimistic. I was just pretending to be.

Pessimism, in my particular case (I don’t speak for all pessimists), was never a matter of choice. Unlike optimism, where I had to consciously decide to see things positively and had to play down the negative aspects of things, pessimism was a more honest reaction to the world. I simply stopped forcing myself to smell the metaphorical roses while ignoring the metaphorical crap, I stopped looking solely at the metaphorical “greener grass on the other side”, and when I saw people who were worse off than I was, I stopped forcing myself to feel happy and grateful about what I already had, and allowed myself to dwell on the realization that these people have things so much worse than I could have ever seen with my optimistic perspective. So much worse.

I’m not going to presume that all optimists are as blind as I was. Neither am I suggesting that all optimists make conscious decisions to ignore some of the negative things in the world. But I have to wonder if there isn’t at least a little bit of ignorance about reality needed in order to be so optimistic, whether that ignorance is in the form of conscious denial or as an unintended consequence of focusing mainly on positive things. Because personally, the only way I think I can adopt an optimistic view of the world right now, after all the bad things I’ve read about, is if I forgot the worst of the things I know, if I ignored them, or if I just didn’t care. It is true what they say, after all — ignorance is bliss.

If I had to identify one specific event that made me abandon optimism, it would be the time I saw a man eating a mango. He was very obviously homeless, wore tattered clothes and went barefoot, and was rummaging through a garbage bin on the sidewalk on a busy intersection (of Gorordo Avenue and, incidentally, Mango Avenue). With a large smile on his face he pulled from the bin a browning mango seed and, after inspecting it, proceeded to suck whatever flavor remained on its fibers. He was happy, this man on the street, totally happy, and yet no matter how hard I tried, despite choosing to see the happy rather than the sad, I could not be happy for him. Any feeling of sharing in his smile was pushed away by a voice screaming that this isn’t right, no one should have to be happy with a discarded mango seed. And if I felt happy for him, knowing that I could do more, I was doing him, and everyone like him, a great injustice.

When I chose to be happy, I was happy, but I was hardly anything else. Now, choosing to see the worst of the world in order to know it better, I feel a profound sadness that this is the world we live in, yet I feel some relief knowing that I now live in the world my feet are touching, and not in a happier version of it conjured in my head. And now, having realized that this world is so very, very flawed, maybe I can see what I can do to help fix it.

It is an unfortunately common occurrence that people qualify all pessimists as dark, morose, depressing people who despise happiness. I have to keep explaining that you can’t generalize people into categories, especially if your idea of what the category means is inaccurate. Not all pessimists have resigned themselves to the idea that the world will never get better. I personally believe that if we recognize that there is a problem, there is a large chance that we can fix it. And not all pessimists are depressed. Depression is caused by an unrealistic negative view about the world, while pessimists usually provide arguments to suggest their views are justified.

And pessimists, myself at least, are not pessimists 100% of the time. Once in a while, even though the world remains so sad, I do allow myself to be happy.