How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

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TopHatFox
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How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by TopHatFox »

I think to reach FI, it's pretty much required to develop a strong sense of optimism. Hours at work are long and many challenges constantly present themselves.

TBH I've been using strategies from The Law of Attraction. Yes yes, it seems like bullshit, but I'd much rather think that the hiring managers will get back to me than not. lol. And I'd much rather share that I "enjoyed delicious tea while learning about how to build a tiny house" than "I stayed in and moped about." People are drawn to optimism and repulsed from negativism.

Where do you draw the line between optimism and being genuine? Do you find yourself putting on a happy face for people? Is it worth the benefit?
Last edited by TopHatFox on Sun Apr 08, 2018 8:30 pm, edited 3 times in total.

TopHatFox
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time?

Post by TopHatFox »

Somebody give me material to indoctrinate myself with permanent optimism (y)

EdithKeeler
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by EdithKeeler »

Where do you draw the line between optimism and being genuine? Do you find yourself putting on a happy face for people? Is it worth the benefit?
Sometimes you do have to fake it ‘til you make it, but really, if you’re feigning optimism all the time, you’re just being a Pollyanna.

I’m generally an optimist, though I can be terribly pessimistic at times. I try to rein that in by trying to reprogram myself, and I’ve done that by acknowledging the negative turn and then having a rational conversation with myself: “Do you seriously believe you’ll lose your job over this? No, not really. Ok, but you did fuck up, correct? Yes. Ok, so what’s the worst thing that will happen? My boss might take me aside and chat with me. So, is that so bad? No. Do you really think that'll happen? No. Most likely no one will notice. Ok, then , quit thinking and saying you’re going to get fired, never have any money and be homeless on the street, ok? Ok.”

I’m not sure that being optimistic all the time is so smart. Pessimism can lead to preparedness and innovation, even. I think it’s better to have a rational outlook on life:

“I’m going to get cancer and die!” —pessimism
“I can eat all the chemicals I want and will never get cancer!”——optimism
“I very much hope to never get cancer. To try to prevent it I will eat healthy and exercise and go for screenings. But just in case, I’m going to buy health insurance” —realism

TopHatFox
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by TopHatFox »

I don't know Edith, I think realism leads to pessimism. Fear Leads to Anger to the Dark Side. Hah. Howabout:

"I'm going to eat healthy, exercise, practice good safety-precautions, and enjoy spending time with a qualified health professional for health consultations. I'll even get health insurance to reduce the cost of all of the above. Now let's go on an adventure!"

While pessimism is exceedingly depressing, realism tends to be guarded. It's an attitude on the defensive. Optimism on the other hand, brings to mind a feeling of abundance, security, and openness. And no matter how bad things get, the way through is to be optimistic. It's easy to fall into pessimism. I think I'd rather be manic to optimistic. Let's try that out. 8-)
Last edited by TopHatFox on Sun Apr 08, 2018 10:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

TopHatFox
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by TopHatFox »


DutchGirl
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by DutchGirl »

As for talking to others: I think it's good to try to avoid complaining: "My cat is sick and my car is not running and my card was declined and my mother takes up so much of my time because she's ill" - doesn't make you a very attractive person to talk to.
And I think it's also good if you don't make others suffer for your own troubles - don't be nasty to others just because you got a speed ticket this morning, for example.

But I think it's also okay to give colleagues some insight into your personal life, including the (truly) bad things that might happen.

Riggerjack
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by Riggerjack »

As strange as it may be to folks here, I am often confused with optimists. As in, others seem to think I am overly optimistic. Partially, this is because I use relentlessly upbeat replies when someone wants to complain to me.

How's it going?
Life is GOOD! I just finished X, and there's just a few hours left until the day/week is done and on to Y!
Oh... Wanders off.

So I use optimism defensively, to ward off complainers. If you are looking for a sympathetic ear, the best I can do is help you understand that you should look elsewhere. Doing it in a friendly, upbeat way is the kindest, and most effective way I know of.

So being optimistic to appeal to people? No idea, never tried it.

But being optimistic is easy. Look around you. What do you see?

I don't follow most of your posts, and honestly, most of your threads seem to be about some idea you had, then lose interest in. But from memory, you recently graduated from a prestigious school, tried the job market, found it to be a poor fit, and you are kind of floating along, trying to pick a direction.

So you could look at it as you just killed years and effort to get a degree that didn't get you where you wanted to go. Promised rewards, snatched away without warning. The world is a cruel, vindictive place that you must protect yourself from. This is reasonable and accurate, maybe that IS how the world works. Maybe you should dig a bomb shelter and buy canned food.

Or...

You just graduated, from a school you seemed to enjoy, with plenty of opportunities to start to learn about relationships and those complications, moved to NYC, got an apt that works and is reasonable, (in that environment,) tried your chosen profession, discovered things about yourself and your chosen career that made you reconsider that choice. You didn't waste 2 decades getting to that point. You are young, educated and credentialed, in a city of opportunities. In a world of 7 billion, where do you rank, in any category you choose?

What's not to be optimistic about? There is nothing stuck, or dead end, or incapable, in any story you tell yourself about yourself. What's not to like? What is it you want to do, but can't? Why would you be anything but optimistic, and how would that be accurate? How hard do you have to twist your vision of the world at large to think life has not been good to you? And how hard is the twist to make life seem hard? Hard by comparison to what?

Or try the behavioral evolution approach:

Optimism and pessimism are just prevailing stories we tell ourselves. We are the narrators, and how we tell that story has everything to do with our perceptions of how we rank among our equals.

If you are not happy with your standing among your equals, you should either advance in whatever area you feel inadequate in, or choose equals more in line with who you want to be, rather than just who you happen to know from previous years doing different things.

I hope that helps.

EdithKeeler
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by EdithKeeler »

Riggerjack, that is an awesome answer.

Dream of Freedom
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by Dream of Freedom »

Optimistic all the time? They make pills for stuff like that. :twisted: Over the counter supplements like 5-htp or saint johns wort would do the trick for a while.

BRUTE
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by BRUTE »

TopHatFox wrote:
Sun Apr 08, 2018 8:05 pm
I think to reach FI, it's pretty much required to develop a strong sense of optimism.
sounds exhausting.

enigmaT120
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by enigmaT120 »

Now that Brute mentions it, it does to me, too. I'm a big fan of near apathy.

slowtraveler
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by slowtraveler »

This is framing. What story do you make with the same facts? There's an infinite variety and it's your choice to frame your life how you desire.

Try looking at your lot compared to the rest of humanity, compared to having nothing-0 friends/family/lovers/social skills (everyone hates you), 0 money (or in huge debt you can't cancel), 0 education (can't read or write or manipulate numbers), horrid health. You seem to be doing damn well compared to that.

That said, forcing yourself to have to feel 1 state all the time is unrealistic. Life has ups and downs. You can frame it so when you're with others, they don't see your downs but emotions are human.

TopHatFox
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by TopHatFox »

enigmaT120 wrote:
Mon Apr 09, 2018 9:39 pm
Now that Brute mentions it, it does to me, too. I'm a big fan of near apathy.
Near apathy is depressing though, and depression takes a LOT of effort to overcome. Been there done that. Keeping an optimistic attitude all the time doesn't mean being happy all the time, just looking at the bright side and working toward hope. At this point it just means cutting out all negative thoughts entirely. Kind of like quitting a junk diet cold. I suppose that is an active process, but it sounds worth it!

Paula
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by Paula »

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

========

Pay attention.

Farm_or
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by Farm_or »

Avoid country music.

Avoid chronic pessimists. On a scale of optimism being far left and pessimism being far right, aim slightly left of realism in the center.

When you spare yourself the wild emotional swings off extreme jubilation and extreme depression, it gets easier to control your emotions.

I can't see how pessimists can garner the energy to get out of bed. You have to be brave and expect good outcomes to try in life. But you also have to expect some failures. Just don't dwell on failing, learn from it and endeavor to fail better.

Campitor
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by Campitor »

@THF

Become a stoic. You can’t control what happens. You can only control how you react and think about events. If I go by your posting history, you’re a pessimist.

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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by jacob »

I draw the line between optimism and being genuine at realism. If a situation is objectively bad, I will focus on figuring out a solution or accept the bad outcome rather than expend energy trying to block it out of head with some kind of mental cheerleading effort.

I prefer to align as close with reality as possible because I think this makes getting through life and dealing with things easier. Deliberately inserting a bias is adverse to the outcome space. You might say that optimism leads to a feeling of abundance, security, and openness and you might be right ... but that feeling only lasts until you get clobbered because you deliberately avoided thinking about the negative possibilities in order to optimize your feels. It's like that old joke about it's better to be a pessimist because you're always positively surprised. This is because pessimists rarely focus on the good outcomes while they've already thought about all the ways things can go wrong.

Optimists trade positive thoughts/feels for negative surprises.
Pessimists trade negative thoughts/feels for positive surprises.

So would you rather have the pilot flying your plane be an optimist or a pessimist? What about the pilot flying your life?

PS: +1 to avoiding country music. Just on general principle :P

BRUTE
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by BRUTE »

Campitor wrote:
Tue Apr 10, 2018 9:06 am
Become a stoic.
why not go all the way and become a cynic?

Riggerjack
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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by Riggerjack »

I think what people are trying to call optimism here is very different from each other.

When people call me optimistic, it doesn't fit the way I think. I am confident of good results from my decisions and actions. Not because I'm inherently positive, but because I am capable. I wasn't always, and I have dedicated my life to building that capability, and it is a primary characteristic of how I define myself.

Each time I have set myself to trying something new, there was a learning curve, and mistakes, but the results are consistently pleasing. So when I have something go bad in a way I hadn't anticipated, I am confident that I can fix it, replace it, or do away with it. If it went bad in a way I did anticipate, I already have the solution worked out. Either way, it makes molehills of mountains.

People who haven't cultivated this extreme DIY mentality seem to think this confidence is not just unsupported, but unsupportable, call it optimism. If one just wants to be positive, I have no idea how to do that. It was a natural outgrowth of removing negative influences from my life. The positive outlook came from having solved most of the things that I could to make my life better.

Twenty odd years ago, I was in a shitty relationship, drinking as much and as often as I could, no job or prospects. A product of public schooling, welfare and enlistment, I was naturally extremely pessimistic. But then I got a job, and built a career, and scrambled and saved, fixing the most pressing problems as they came up.

The light came on when I was fixing something, again. I had "fixed" it before, but my jury rigged fix had lasted only about as long as it probably should have. Nobody in my family could fix much of anything. My parents, under duress, might be able to change a tire, if nobody else was around, and they had a spare. My whole life I had jury rigged fixes and fixes to fixes, never really looking at the full system for how I could stop this fix from being necessary. Getting a decent job gave me the resources to look to long term solutions. To just not having the problem. Not buying a new lawnmower because the old one wouldn't start, but buying a carburetor, and replacing the old one, rather than cleaning it again. Buying the right tools, instead of making do with pliers. Oiling hinges and doing maintenance before things broke. I'm no Casanova, but taking time off to reflect after a relationship went bad, to learn to not repeat whatever choices I made that contributed to the problem. Including the choice of woman.

Growing up poor and stupid, meant that the examples of success I had were the guys who could fix things. The guys who could fix their cars, so they could keep their jobs. The guys who could turn their garage into another bedroom and have more space. The guys who could BBQ or fix a leaky toilet or roof. Because I could do none of these things, and since I was always moving, never really had a chance to learn. And honestly, I was afraid of going off to college, learning to be an engineer, and still not knowing how to do these things. I desperately needed to avoid being a booksmart dumbass, a title I had been earning my whole life, until then. So construction, and the army, and more construction, then engineering was the path to success for me.

Of course, now, we have the internet and YouTube. Those years of learning practical skills are less valuable, because now it's all easy. So now, if you want to learn to do anything, you can do a few minutes or hours of clicking, and you know all you need to. But my self image, of a man who can change whatever he sets his mind to, came from that search for capabilities, and it has done good things for me as a person. That it's now easy, is no reason not to do the same.

But my hangups about being capable are what made this so important to me. Everyone has something they don't like about themselves. Identifying that something, and resolving it is how we grow. Turning away from it let's us stay where we are, and leads to feelings of being stuck. Feelings of weakness. Feeling justified in our negativity.

So what I am try to describe is how to make one's life positive, rather than feel more positive about the same life that one currently doesn't feel good about.

When in doubt, look around you, and make something, anything, better. That simple act, repeated, makes life better, and naturally, one feels better, living a better life. As always, better is in the eye of the beholder, your definition of better should be different than mine.


"Today, I will do what others will not, so tomorrow I can do what others cannot."
Jerry Rice

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Re: How to be optimistic all the time? Presenting genuinely v. happily

Post by jacob »

@Riggerjack - The word is agency. One might define agency as optimism when it comes to influencing one's personal outcome space. Otherwise optimism/pessimism relates to perception of the outside world. Those two dimensions can be combined in four different ways.

The default orientation of the INTJ, specifically contingency planning, is a kind of pessimistic agency: making executable plans to avoid things that could go wrong.

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