essays on optimism

Helen Keller on Optimism

By maria popova.

She opens the first half of the book, Optimism Within , by reflecting on the universal quest for happiness, that alluring and often elusive art-science at the heart of all human aspiration:

Could we choose our environment, and were desire in human undertakings synonymous with endowment, all men would, I suppose, be optimists. Certainly most of us regard happiness as the proper end of all earthly enterprise. The will to be happy animates alike the philosopher, the prince and the chimney-sweep. No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

But Keller admonishes against the “what-if” mentality that pegs our happiness on the attainment of material possession , which always proves vacant , rather than on accessing a deeper sense of purpose :

Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.

Recounting her own miraculous blossoming from the inner captivity of a deaf-mute to the intellectual height of a cultural luminary, she brings exquisite earnestness to this rhetorical question:

Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. … Can anyone who escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist? My early experience was thus a leap from bad to good. If I tried, I could not check the momentum of my first leap out of the dark; to move breast forward as a habit learned suddenly at that first moment of release and rush into the light. With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.

Still, Keller is careful to distinguish between intelligent and reckless optimism:

Optimism that does not count the cost is like a house builded on sand. A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him.

Reflecting once again on her own experience, she argues that, much like the habits of mind William James advocated for as the secret of life , optimism is a choice:

I know what evil is. Once or twice I have wrestled with it, and for a time felt its chilling touch on my life; so I speak with knowledge when I say that evil is of no consequence, except as a sort of mental gymnastic. For the very reason that I have come in contact with it, I am more truly an optimist. I can say with conviction that the struggle which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life. The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field, I cannot reap a kernel of the good.

Keller explores the two anchors of optimism — one’s inner life and the outer world — and admonishes against the toxic nature of doubt :

I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true. To what good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this beautiful and willful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness. Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.

Like Isabel Allende, who sees creativity as order to the chaos of life , Keller riffs on Carlyle and argues for creative enterprise as a source of optimism:

Work, production, brings life out of chaos, makes the individual a world, an order; and order is optimism.

And yet she is sure to caution against the cult of productivity , a reminder all the timelier today as we often squander presence in favor of productivity , and uses Darwin’s famed daily routine to make her point:

Darwin could work only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy. I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. It is my service to think how I can best fulfill the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.

She sees optimism, like Italo Calvino did literature , as a collective enterprise:

I love the good that others do; for their activity is an assurance that whether I can help or not, the true and the good will stand sure.

Though her tone at times may appear to be overly religious on the surface, Keller’s skew is rather philosophical, demonstrating that, not unlike science has a spiritual quality , optimism is a kind of secular religion:

I trust, and nothing that happens disturbs my trust. I recognize the beneficence of the power which we all worship as supreme — Order, Fate, the Great Spirit, Nature, God. I recognize this power in the sun that makes all things grow and keeps life afoot. I make a friend of this indefinable force, and straightway I feel glad, brave and ready for any lot Heaven may decree for me. This is my religion of optimism. […] Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, “the source and centre of all minds, their only point of rest.”

In the second half of the book, Optimism Without , she makes an eloquent addition to these notable definitions of philosophy and touches on the ancient quandary of whether what we perceive as external reality might be an illusion :

Philosophy is the history of a deaf-blind person writ large. From the talks of Socrates up through Plato, Berkeley and Kant, philosophy records the efforts of human intelligence to be free of the clogging material world and fly forth into a universe of pure idea. A deaf-blind person ought to find special meaning in Plato’s Ideal World . These things which you see and hear and touch are not the reality of realities, but imperfect manifestations of the Idea, the Principal, the Spiritual; the Idea is the truth, the rest is delusion.

Much like legendary filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky advised the young to learn to enjoy their own company , Keller argues for philosophy as the gateway to finding richness in life without leaving one’s self — an art all the more important in the age of living alone . She writes:

My brethren who enjoy the fullest use of the senses are not aware of any reality which may not equally well be in reach of my mind. Philosophy gives to the mind the prerogative of seeing truth, and bears us not a realm where I, who am blind, and not different from you who see. … It seemed to me that philosophy had been written for my special consolation, whereby I get even with some modern philosophers who apparently think that I was intended as an experimental case for their special instruction! But in a little measure my small voice of individual experience does join in the declaration of philosophy that the good is the only world, and that world is a world of spirit. It is also a universe where order is All, where an unbroken logic holds the parts together, where distance defines itself as non-existence, where evil, as St. Augustine held, is delusion, and therefore is not. The meaning of philosophy to me is not only its principles, but also in the happy isolation of its great expounders. They were seldom of the world, even when like Plato and Leibnitz they moved in its courts and drawing rooms. To the tumult of life they were deaf, and they were blind to its distraction and perplexing diversities. Sitting alone, but not in darkness, they learned to find everything in themselves…

In a sentiment Neil deGrasse Tyson would come to echo more than a century later in his articulate case for why our smallness amidst the cosmos should be a source of assurance rather than anxiety , Keller observes:

Thus from the philosophy I learn that we see only shadows and know only in part, and that all things change; but the mind, the unconquerable mind, compasses all truth, embraces the universe as it is, converts the shadows to realities and makes tumultuous changes seem but moments in an eternal silence, or short lines in the infinite theme of perfection, and the evil but “a halt on the way to good.” Though with my hand I grasp only a small part of the universe, with my spirit I see the whole, and in my thought I can compass the beneficent laws by which it is governed. The confidence and trust which these conceptions inspire teach me to rest safe in my life as in a fate, and protect me from spectral doubts and fears.

Keller argues of America as a mecca of optimism. And yet, as hearteningly patriotic as her case may be, a look at the present state of the plight of marriage equality , the gaping wound of income inequality , and the indignity of immigrants’ struggles (of whom I am one) reveals how much further we have to go to live up to this optimistic ideal:

It is true, America has devoted herself largely to the solution of material problems — breaking the fields, opening mines, irrigating the deserts, spanning the continent with railroads; but she is doing these things in a new way, by educating her people, by placing at the service of every man’s need every resource of human skill. She is transmuting her industrial wealth into the education of her workmen, so that unskilled people shall have no place in American life, so that all men shall bring mind and soul to the control of matter. Her children are not drudges and slaves. The Constitution has declared it, and the spirit of our institutions has confirmed it. The best the land can teach them they shall know. They shall learn that there is no upper class in their country, and no lower, and they shall understand how it is that God and His world are for everybody. America might do all this, and still be selfish, still be a worshipper of Mammon. But America is the home of charity as well as commerce. … Who shall measure the sympathy, skill and intelligence with which she ministers to all who come to her, and lessens the ever-swelling tide of poverty, misery and degradation which every year rolls against her gates from all the nations? When I reflect on all these facts, I cannot but think that, Tolstoi and other theorists to the contrary, it is a splendid thing to be an American. In America the optimist finds abundant reason for confidence in the present and hope for the future, and this hope, this confidence, may well extend over all the great nations of the earth.

Further on, she adds, “It is significant that the foundation of that law is optimistic” — and yet what more pessimistic a law than an immigration policy based on the assumption that if left to their own devices, more immigrants would do harm than would do good, what sadder than a policy built on the belief that affording love the freedom of equality would result in destruction rather than dignity?

Still, some of Keller’s seemingly over-optimistic contentions have been since confirmed by modern science — for instance, the decline of violence , which she rightly observes:

If we compare our own time with the past, we find in modern statistics a solid foundation for a confident and buoyant world-optimism. Beneath the doubt, the unrest, the materialism, which surround us still glows and burns at the world’s best life a steadfast faith. […] During the past fifty years crime has decreased. True, the records of to-day contain a longer list of crime. But our statistics are more complete and accurate than the statistics of times past. Besides, there are many offenses on the list which half a century ago would not have been thought of as crimes. This shows that the public conscience is more sensitive than it ever was. Our definition of crime has grown stricter,* our punishment of it more lenient and intelligent. The old feeling of revenge has largely disappeared. It is no longer an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The criminal is treated as one who is diseased. He is confined not merely for punishment, but because he is a menace to society. While he is under restraint, he is treated with human care and disciplined so that his mind shall be cured of its disease, and he shall be restored to society able to do his part of its work.

* Though this may be mostly true on a theoretical level, practical disgraces to democracy like the epidemic of rape in the military offer a tragic counterpoint.

In reflecting on the relationship between education and the good life , Keller argues for the broadening of education from an industrial model of rote memorization to fostering “scholars who can link the unlinkable” . Though this ideal, too, is a long way from reality today , Keller’s words shine as a timeless guiding light to aspire toward:

Education broadens to include all men, and deepens to teach all truths. Scholars are no longer confined to Greek, Latin and mathematics, but they also study science converts the dreams of the poet, the theory of the mathematician and the fiction of the economist into ships, hospitals and instruments that enable one skilled hand to perform the work of a thousand. The student of to-day is not asked if he has learned his grammar. Is he a mere grammar machine, a dry catalogue of scientific facts, or has he acquired the qualities of manliness? His supreme lesson is to grapple with great public questions, to keep his mind hospitable to new idea and new views of truth, to restore the finer ideals that are lost sight of in the struggle for wealth and to promote justice between man and man. He learns that there may be substitutes for human labor — horse-power and machinery and books; but “there are no substitutes for common sense, patience, integrity, courage.”

In a sentiment philosopher Judith Butler would come to second in her fantastic recent commencement address on the value of the humanities as a tool of empathy , Keller argues:

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage — the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think. No loss by flood and lightening, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his tolerance has destroyed.

“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light,” Stanley Kubrick memorably asserted , and it’s hard not to see in his words an echo of Keller’s legacy. She presages the kernel of Martin Seligman’s seminal concept of learned optimism and writes:

The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. One who believes that the pain in the world outweighs the joy, and expresses that unhappy conviction, only adds to the pain. … Life is a fair field, and the right will prosper if we stand by our guns. Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. … If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.

In the final and most practical part of the book, The Practice of Optimism , Keller urges:

Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as if they were privileges? The optimist cannot fall back, cannot falter; for he knows his neighbor will be hindered by his failure to keep in line. He will therefore hold his place fearlessly and remember the duty of silence. Sufficient unto each heart is its own sorrow. He will take the iron claws of circumstance in his hand and use them as tools to break away the obstacle that block his path. He will work as if upon him alone depended the establishment of heaven and earth.

She once again return to the notion of optimism as a collective good rather than merely an individual choice, even a national asset:

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world. […] Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.

In an ever-timelier remark in our age of fear-mongering sensationalism in the news — a remark E. B. White would come to second decades later in arguing that a writer “should tend to lift people up, not lower them down” — Keller points to the responsibility of the press in upholding its share of this collective enterprise:

Our newspapers should remember this. The press is the pulpit of the modern world, and on the preachers who fill it much depends. If the protest of the press against unrighteous measures is to avail, then for ninety nine days the word of the preacher should be buoyant and of good cheer, so that on the hundredth day the voice of censure may be a hundred times strong.

Keller ends on a note of inextinguishable faith in the human spirit and timeless hope for the future of our world:

As I stand in the sunshine if a sincere and earnest optimism, my imagination “paints yet more glorious triumphs on the cloud-curtain of the future.” Out of the fierce struggle and turmoil of contending systems and powers I see a brighter spiritual era slowly emerge —an era in which there shall be no England, no France, no Germany, no America, no this people or that, but one family, the human race; one law, peace; one need, harmony; one means, labor…

Pair Optimism — which is available as a free download in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg — with these 7 heartening reads on the subject , then revisit Keller’s stirring first experience of dance and her memorable meeting with Mark Twain , who later became her creative champion and confidante .

— Published June 21, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/06/21/helen-keller-on-optimism/ —

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Optimism Helps You Achieve Goals With Less Stress

When you hear the word optimism, what comes to mind? Does it resonate as a tried-and-true life practice? Or perhaps it sounds too Pollyanna-ish for your taste?

Optimism is essentially hopefulness about the future, a general belief that things will work out in your favor. Whether you are a devoted practitioner or devout skeptic, you’ve likely asked yourself at least once, does optimism produce actual life benefits or is it just feel-good fluff?

A new study provides evidence that cultivating optimism might be worthwhile. According to the paper, which was published last month in the journal Emotion , optimism appears to be particularly useful when tackling challenges or approaching situations that could elicit high levels of stress.

Researchers Heather Lench and Zari Carpenter explored the benefits of optimism using two separate studies. In the first study, over a thousand undergraduates completed a survey two weeks before taking their first psychology exam, which assessed their anticipated grade and their emotions about the exam. One day before the exam, participants were surveyed again about their expected grade and their study habits leading up to the exam. Two days after taking the exam, participants reported on the actual grade they received, as well as their emotional response.

Indeed, they found that there is a likely connection between optimism and effort. Greater optimism two weeks prior to the exam predicted more study hours, greater overall satisfaction with the quality of their studying, and a better grade on the exam. If students lowered their expectations the day before the exam, they’d study less and get a worse grade. This finding highlights that it’s not just optimism that drives effort and results, but unflappable optimism that holds steady over a period of time.

In the second study, researchers used the context of the highly anticipated Match Day, a day when fourth-year medical students find out which hospitals they have been paired with for their residency. Where medical students receive their residency training can impact the trajectory of their medical career,  which makes it a very important and often stressful culminating event after four years of rigorous study. 

The 182 participants first reported their ranked list of residency programs. Two weeks before Match Day, researchers surveyed participants on several aspects of the matching process, such as their happiness and stress levels, their perceived likelihood of matching with their choices, and their anticipated level of happiness if they got into the program they ranked first.

The day after Match Day, once participants found out which medical residency, if any, they’d been matched to, they received another survey assessing their happiness and stress levels.

Over 50% of participants matched with their top-ranked program and 2% of participants did not match at all. The researchers found that high optimism of matching with their top choice resulted in higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress during the process leading up to the match decisions, as well as a greater likelihood that they matched with their top choice.

The study also refuted a common misbelief about optimism—that if I’m too optimistic and don’t get what I want, I will be even more devastated. Medical students who were optimistic, but did not match, did not demonstrate greater levels of distress. In other words, the optimism seemed to fuel resilience in the face of failure.

Why? Optimism appears to fuel our efforts in achieving personal goals, and also improves the overall quality of our experiences while doing so, by increasing happiness and reducing stress. Less stress also reduces the likelihood of mental distress, a common side effect of striving. “For future events that are specific, controllable, and important,” conclude the researchers, “it appears optimism has benefits with very little cost.”

About the Author

Shanna B. Tiayon

Shanna B. Tiayon, Ph.D. , also known as “The Wellbeing Dr.,” is a writer, speaker, and trainer working in the area of well-being. Currently, Shanna is the owner of WellbeingWorks , LLC, a boutique well-being firm bringing together the best interdisciplinary knowledge in the areas of social psychology, human resources, research, and training design.

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What Is Optimism?

How Optimism Affects Your Physical and Mental Health

Elizabeth Scott, PhD is an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

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Signs of Optimism

Are you an optimist or pessimist, causes of optimism.

• How to Practice

Impact of Optimism

Potential pitfalls.

Optimism is a mental attitude characterized by hope and confidence in success and a positive future. Optimists tend to view hardships as learning experiences or temporary setbacks. Even the most miserable day holds the promise for them that "tomorrow will probably be better."

Optimists expect good things to happen, whereas pessimists instead predict unfavorable outcomes. Optimistic attitudes are linked to several benefits, including better coping skills, lower stress levels, better physical health, and higher persistence when pursuing goals.

If you always see the brighter side of things, you may experience more positive events in your life than others, find yourself less stressed, and even enjoy more significant health benefits.

There are many key characteristics that optimists tend to share. Some signs that you tend to be optimistic:

• You feel that good things will happen in the future.
• You expect things to work out for the best.
• You feel like you will succeed in the face of life's challenges.
• You feel that the future looks bright.
• You think that even good things can come from adverse events.
• You see challenges or obstacles as opportunities to learn.
• You feel gratitude for the good things in your life.
• You are always looking for ways to make the most of opportunities.
• You have a positive attitude about yourself and others.
• You accept responsibility for mistakes but don't dwell on them.
• You don't let one bad experience muddy your expectations for the future.

An example of optimism is believing that there will always be opportunities to make things better tomorrow, even if you are experiencing challenges today.

Take our fast and free quiz to find out if you are more of an optimist or pessimist.

The exact causes of optimism are not fully understood, but several factors likely play a role. Genetics, upbringing, culture, and other environmental influences can influence optimism.

According to one twin study, genetics account for around 25% of optimism. Another study found that age is an important determinant, with optimism increasing through young adulthood, leveling off between ages 55 and 70, and then declining in older adulthood.

Research has also shown that optimism and pessimism are influenced by neurophysiology. Optimistic attitudes are associated with activity in the lef-hemisphere of the brain, while pessimistic characteristics are connected to activity in the right hemisphere.

Explanatory Styles

Many factors influence optimism, but whether you tend to be more of an optimist or more of a pessimist can often be explained by how you explain the events of your life.

Explanatory style or attributional style refers to how people explain the events of their lives. There are three facets of how people can explain a situation. This can influence whether they lean toward being optimists or pessimists:

• Stable vs. Unstable: Can time change things, or do things stay the same regardless of time?
• Global vs. Local: Is a situation a reflection of just one part of your life, or your life as a whole?
• Internal vs. External: Do you feel events are caused by you or by an outside force?

Realists see things relatively clearly, but most of us aren’t realists. Instead, we tend to attribute the events in our lives either optimistically or pessimistically.

Optimist Explanatory Style

Optimists explain positive events as having happened because of their own actions or characteristics (internal). They also see them as evidence that more positive things will happen in the future (stable) and in other areas of their lives (global).

Conversely, they see negative events as not being their fault (external). They also see them as being flukes (isolated) that have nothing to do with other areas of their lives or future events (local).

For example, if an optimist gets a promotion, they will likely believe it’s because they are good at their job and will receive more benefits and promotions in the future. If they are passed over for the promotion, it’s likely because they were having an bad month because of extenuating circumstances, but will do better in the future.

Pessimist Explanatory Style

Pessimists think in the opposite way. They believe that negative events are caused by their own mistakes or traits (internal). They believe that one mistake means more will come (stable), and mistakes in other areas of life are inevitable (global) because they are the cause. They see positive events as flukes (local) that are caused by things outside their control (external) and probably won’t happen again (unstable).

A pessimist would see a promotion as a lucky event that probably won’t happen again, and may even worry that they’ll now be under more scrutiny. Being passed over for a promotion would probably be explained as not being skilled enough. They would, therefore, expect to be passed over again.

Attribute positive events to internal causes

Attribute negative events to external causes

Believe that good things will happen in the future

Tend to view bad things as mistakes or random flukes

Attribute positive events to external causes

Attribute negative events to internal causes

Believe that bad things will happen in the future

Tend to see good things as mistakes or flukes

How to Practice Optimism

Understandably, if you’re an optimist, this bodes well for your future. Negative events are more likely to roll off of your back while positive events affirm your belief in yourself, your ability to make good things happen now and in the future, and in the goodness of life.

Research suggests that genetics determine about 25% of your optimism levels and environmental variables out of your control—such as your socioeconomic status—also play an important role.   But this doesn't mean that you can't actively improve your attitude.

While you might tend to have either an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style, there are things that you can do the help cultivate a more optimistic attitude. These include:

• Become more mindful : Mindfulness is a focus on being engaged, attentive, and present in the here and now. It can be a useful technique to help you focus on what matters in the present and avoid worrying about future events and things that are outside of your control. If you are living fully in the moment, you are much less likely to ruminate over negative past experiences or worry about upcoming events. This allows you to feel more appreciative of what you have now and less consumed with regrets and anxieties.
• Practice gratitude : Gratitude can be defined as an appreciation for what is important in life. One study found that participants who were assigned to write in a gratitude journal showed increased optimism and resilience .   If you are trying to develop a more optimistic attitude, set aside a few minutes each day to jot down some of the things for which you are grateful.
• Write down your positive emotions : Research has shown that something as simple as writing down positive thoughts can help improve your optimism. One study found that expressive writing focused on positive emotions was linked to decreased mental distress and improved mental well-being.  

It is also possible to develop learned optimism . Pessimists can essentially learn to be optimists by thinking about their reactions to adversity in a new way and consciously challenge negative self-talk.

Cognitive Restructuring

Using a practice called cognitive restructuring , you can help yourself and others become more optimistic by consciously challenging negative, self-limiting thinking and replacing it with more optimistic thought patterns.

The process of cognitive restructuring involves a few different steps:

• Identify the situations that are triggering negative thoughts or moods.
• Assess how you are feeling in the moment.
• Identify the negative thoughts that you are having in response to the situation.
• Look at the evidence to either support or refute your negative thoughts.
• Focus on the objective facts, and replace automatic negative thoughts with more positive, realistic ones.

Optimism is important because it can have such a significant impact on your mental and physical well-being. Research has shown that an optimistic worldview carries certain advantages, such as better health, greater achievement, less stress, and greater longevity.

Better Health

Studies regularly show that optimists are more likely to maintain better physical health than pessimists, including a 50% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and greater survival rates when fighting cancer.   Some studies have also linked a pessimistic explanatory style with higher rates of infectious disease, poor health, and earlier mortality.

Greater Achievement

Psychologist Martin Seligman, the founding father of positive psychology , analyzed sports teams and found that the more optimistic teams created more positive synergy and performed better than the pessimistic ones .

Another study showed that pessimistic swimmers who were led to believe they’d done worse than they had were prone to future poor performance. Optimistic swimmers didn’t have this vulnerability.

Persistence

Optimists don’t give up as easily as pessimists, and they are more likely to achieve success because of it. People with optimistic attitudes are more likely to continue working toward their goals, even in the face of obstacles, challenges, and setbacks. Such persistence ultimately means that they are more likely to accomplish their goals.

Emotional Health

Research suggests that cognitive therapy (which involves reframing a person's thought processes) can be as effective or more effective than antidepressant medications in the treatment of clinical depression .

Such improvements also tend to be long-lasting, suggesting that they are more than a temporary fix. People with this optimism training appear to be better able to handle future setbacks effectively.

Increased Longevity

In a retrospective study of 34 healthy Hall of Fame baseball players who played between 1900 and 1950, optimists lived significantly longer. Other studies have shown that optimistic breast cancer patients had a better quality of life than pessimistic and hopeless patients.  

Less Stress

Optimists also tend to experience less stress than pessimists or realists. Because they believe in themselves and their abilities, they expect good things to happen. They see negative events as minor setbacks to be easily overcome and view positive events as evidence of further good things to come. Believing in themselves, they also take more risks and create more positive events in their lives.

Research shows that optimists are more proactive with stress management . They tend to favor approaches that reduce or eliminate stressors and their emotional consequences. Because optimists work harder at stress management, they are less stressed.

Optimism is generally a positive characteristic that confers a number of physical and mental health benefits. But this does not mean that is doesn't have a few potential pitfalls. Some ways that optimism can be detrimental include:

• Optimism bias : Sometimes excessive optimism can lead people to overestimate the likelihood that they can experience good things while avoiding bad things. The optimism bias suggests that people often underestimate their risk of experiencing negative outcomes. This can sometimes lead people to engage in risky behaviors that actually increase their chances of having a bad outcome.
• Poor risk assessment : When people are overly optimistic about something, they may be less likely to think about all of the potential risks and take steps to mitigate those issues. This can ultimately make it more likely that their efforts might fail, or at least run into major problems along the way.
• Toxic positivity : Sometimes people tend to overvalue positive feelings while ignoring or even repressing negative ones. It can also cause people to invalidate the emotional experiences of people who are going through difficult times.

Optimists can avoid some of these pitfalls by focusing on maintaining a healthy, realistic approach to positivity. Rather than focusing only on "staying positive" and ignoring other emotions, the goal should be to try to look on the bright side while still acknowledging the difficulties of the situation.

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By Elizabeth Scott, PhD Elizabeth Scott, PhD is an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.

Optimism (1903)

Transcription

Part I Optimism Within

Could we choose our environment, and were desire in human undertakings synonymous with endowment, all men would, I suppose, be optimists. Certainly most of us regard happiness as the proper end of all earthly enterprise. The will to be happy animates alike the philosopher, the prince and the chimney-sweep. No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements if art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.

Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, - if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing. As sinners stand up in meeting and testify to the goodness of God, so one who is called afflicted may rise up in gladness of conviction and testify to the goodness of life.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. My life was without past or future; death, the pessimist would say, "a consummation devoutly to be wished." But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day of thought, and love and joy and hope came up in a passion of obedience to knowledge. Can anyone who escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist?

My early experience was thus a leap from bad to good. If I tried, I could not check the momentum of my first leap out of the dark; to move breast forward as a habit learned suddenly at that first moment of release and rush into the light. With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope. Darkness cannot shut me in again. I have had a glimpse of the shore, and can now live by the hope of reaching it.

So my optimism is no mild and unreasoning satisfaction. A poet once said I must be happy because I did not see the bare, cold present, but lived in a beautiful dream. I do live in a beautiful dream; but that dream is the actual, the present, - not cold, but warm; not bare, but furnished with a thousand blessings. The very evil which the poet supposed would be a cruel disillusionment is necessary to the fullest knowledge of joy. Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of truth and love and goodness.

It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference. It is not enough to say that the twentieth century is the best age in the history of mankind, and to take refuge from the evils of the world in skyey (sic) dreams of good. How many good men, prosperous and contented, looked around and saw naught but good, while millions of their fellow-men were bartered and sold like cattle! No doubt, there were comfortable optimists who thought Wilberforce a meddlesome fanatic when he was working with might and main to free the slaves. I distrust the rash optimism in this country that cries, "Hurrah, we're all right! This is the greatest nation on earth," when there are grievances that call loudly for redress. That is false optimism. Optimism that does not count the cost is like a house builded (sic) on sand. A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him.

I know what evil is. Once or twice I have wrestled with it, and for a time felt its chilling touch on my life; so I speak with knowledge when I say that evil is of no consequence, except as a sort of mental gymnastic. For the very reason that I have come in contact with it, I am more truly an optimist. I can say with conviction that the struggle which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life. The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field, I cannot reap a kernel of the good.

Thus my optimism is grounded in two worlds, myself and what is about me. I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true. To what good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this beautiful and wilful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness. Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.

As my college days draw to a close, I find myself looking forward with beating heart and bright anticipations to what the future holds of activity for me. My share in the work of the world may be limited; but the fact that it is work makes it precious. Nay, the desire and will to work is optimism itself.

Two generations ago Carlyle flung forth his gospel of work. To the dreamers of the Revolution, who built cloud-castles of happiness, and, when the inevitable winds rent the castles asunder, turned pessimists -to those ineffectual Endymions, Alastors and Werthers, this Scots peasant, man of dreams in the hard, practical world, cried aloud his creed of labor. "Be no longer a Chaos, but a World. Produce! produce! Were it but the pitifullest (sic) infinitesimal fraction of product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh wherein no man may work."

Some have said Carlyle was taking refuge from a hard world by bidding men grind and toil, eyes to the earth, and so forget their misery. This is not Carlyle's thought. "Fool!" he cries, "the Ideal is in thyself; the Impediment is also in thyself. Work out the Ideal in the poor, miserable Actual; live, think, believe, and be free!" It is plain what he says, that work, production, brings life out of chaos, makes the individual a world, an order; and order is optimism.

I, too, can work, and because I love to labor with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all. I used to think I should be thwarted in my desire to do something useful. But I have found out that through the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless. The gladdest laborer in the vineyard may be a cripple. Even should the others outstrip him, yet the vineyard ripens in the sun each year, and the full clusters weigh into his hand. Darwin could work only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy. I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot. Green, the historian, tells us that the world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker; and that thought alone suffices to guide me in this dark world and wide. I love the good that others do; for their activity is an assurance that whether I can help that whether I can help or not, the true and the good will stand sure.

I trust, and nothing that happens disturbs my trust. I recognize the beneficence of the power which we all worship as supreme-Order, Fate, the Great Spirit, Nature, God. I recognize this power in the sun that makes all things grow and keeps life afoot. I make a friend of this indefinable force, and straightway I feel glad, brave and ready for any lot Heaven may decree for me. This is my religion of optimism.

Part II Optimism Without

Optimism, then, is a fact within my own heart. But as I look out upon life, my heart meets no contradiction. The outward world justifies my inward universe of good. All through the years I have spent in college, my reading has been a continuous discovery of good. In literature, philosophy, religion and history I find the mighty witnesses to my faith.

Philosophy is the history of a deaf-blind person writ large. From the talks of Socrates up through Plato, Berkeley and Kant, philosophy records the efforts of human intelligence to be free of the clogging material world and fly forth into a universe of pure idea. A deaf-blind person ought to find special meaning in Plato's Ideal World. These things which you see and hear and touch are not the reality of realities, but imperfect manifestations of the Idea, the Principal, the Spiritual; the Idea is the truth, the rest is delusion.

If this be so, my brethren who enjoy the fullest use of the senses are not aware of any reality which may not equally well be in reach of my mind. Philosophy gives to the mind the prerogative of seeing truth, and bears us not a realm where I, who am blind, and not different from you who see. When I learned from Berkeley that your eyes receive an inverted image of things which your brain unconsciously corrects, I began to suspect that the eye is not a very reliable instrument after all, and I felt as one who had been restored to equality with others, glad, not because the senses avail them so little, but because in God's eternal world, mind and spirit avail so much. It seemed to me that philosophy had been written for my special consolation, whereby I get even with some modern philosophers who apparently think that I was intended as an experimental case for their special instruction! But in a little measure my small voice of individual experience does join in the declaration of philosophy that the good is the only world, and that world is a world of spirit. It is also a universe where order is All, where an unbroken logic holds the parts together, where distance defines itself as non-existence, where evil, as St. Augustine held, is delusion, and therefore is not.

The meaning of philosophy to me is not only its principles, but also in the happy isolation of its great expounders (sic). They were seldom of the world, even when like Plato and Leibnitz they moved in its courts and drawing rooms. To the tumult of life they were deaf, and they were blind to its distraction and perplexing diversities. Sitting alone, but not in darkness, they learned to find everything in themselves, and failing to find it even there, they still trusted in meeting the truth face to face when they should leave the earth behind and become partakers in the wisdom of God. The great mystics lived alone, deaf and blind, but dwelling with God.

I understand how it was possible for Spinoza to find deep and sustained happiness when he was excommunicated, poor, despised and suspected alike by Jew and Christian; not that the kind world of men ever treated me so, but that his isolation from the universe of sensuous joys is somewhat analogous to mine. He loved the good for its own sake. Like many great spirits he accepted his place in the world, and confided himself childlike to a higher power, believing that it worked through his hands and predominated in his being. He trusted implicitly, and that is what I do. Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, "the source and centre (sic) of all minds, their only point of rest."

Thus from the philosophy I learn that we see only shadows and know only in part, and that all things change; but the mind, the unconquerable mind, compasses all truth, embraces the universe as it is, converts the shadows to realities and makes tumultuous changes seem but moments in an eternal silence, or short lines in the infinite theme of perfection, and the evil but "a halt on the way to good." Though with my hand I grasp only a small part of the universe, with my spirit I see the whole, and in my thought I can compass the beneficent laws by which it is governed. The confidence and trust which these conceptions inspire teach me to rest safe in my life as in a fate, and protect me from spectral doubts and fears. Verily, blessed are ye that have not seen, and yet have believed.

All the world's great philosophers have been lovers of God and believers in man's inner goodness. To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists.

The growth of philosophy is the story of man's spiritual life. Outside lies that great mass of events which we call History. As I look on this mass I see it take form and shape itself in the ways of God. The history of man is an epic of progress. In the world within and the world without I see a wonderful correspondence, a glorious symbolism which reveals the human divine communing together, the lesson of philosophy repeated in fact. In all the parts that compose, the history of mankind hides the spirit of good, and gives meaning to the whole.

Far back in the twilight of history I see the savage fleeing from the forces of nature which he has not learned control, and seeking to propitiate supernatural beings which are but the creation of his superstitious fear. With a shift of his imagination I see the savage emancipated, civilized. He no longer worships the grim deities of ignorance. Through suffering he has learned to build a roof over his head, to defend his life and his home, and over his state he has erected a temple in which he worships the joyous gods of light and song. From suffering he has learned justice; from the struggle with his fellows he has learned the distinction between right and wrong which makes him a moral being. He is sighted with the genius of Greece.

But Greece was not perfect. He poetical and religious ideals were far above her practice; therefore she died, that her ideals might survive to ennoble coming ages.

Rome, too, left the world a rich inheritance. Through the vicissitudes of history her laws and ordered government have stood a majestic object-lesson for the ages. But when the stern, frugal character of her people ceased to be the bone and sinew of her civilization, Rome fell.

Then came the new nations of the North and founded a more permanent society. The base of Greek and Roman society was the slave, crushed into the condition of the wretches who "labored, foredone (sic), in the field and at the workshop, like haltered horses, if blind, so much the quieter." The base of the new society was the freeman who fought, tilled, judged and grew from more to more. He wrought a state out of tribal kinship and fostered an independence and self-reliance which no oppression could destroy. The story of man's slow ascent from savagery through barbarism and self-mastery to civilization is the embodiment of the spirit of optimism. From the first hour of the new nations each century has seen a better Europe, until the development of the world demanded America.

Tolstoi said the other day that America, once the hope of the world, was in bondage to Mammon. Tolstoi and other Europeans have still much to learn about this great, free country of ours before they understand the unique civic struggle which America is undergoing. She is confronted with the mighty task of assimilating all the foreigners that are drawn together from every country, and welding them into one people with one national spirit. We have the right to demand the forbearance of critics until the United States has demonstrated whether she can make one people out of all nations of the earth. London economists are alarmed at less than five hundred thousand foreign-born in a population of six million, and discuss earnestly the danger of too many aliens. But what is their problem in comparison with that of New York, which counts nearly one million five hundred thousand foreigners among its three and a half million citizens? Think of it! Every third person in our American metropolis is an alien. By these figures alone America's greatness can be measured.

It is true, America has devoted herself largely to the solution of material problems-breaking the fields, opening mines, irrigating the deserts, spanning the continent with railroads; but she is doing these things in a new way, by educating her people, by placing at the service of every man's need every resource of human skill. She is transmuting her industrial wealth into the education of her workmen, so that unskilled people shall have no place in American life, so that all men shall bring mind and soul to the control of matter. Her children are not drudges and slaves. The Constitution has declared it, and the spirit of our institutions has confirmed it. The best the land can teach them they shall know. They shall learn that there is no upper class in their country, and no lower, and they shall understand how it is that God and His world are for everybody.

America might do all this, and still be selfish, still be a worshipper of Mammon. But America is the home of charity as well as commerce. In the midst of roaring traffic, side by side with noisy factory and sky-reaching warehouse, one sees the school, the library, the hospital, the park-works of public benevolence which represent wealth wrought into ideas that shall endure forever. Behold what America has already done to alleviate suffering and restore the afflicted to society - given sight to the fingers of the blind, language to the dumb lip, and mind to the idiot clay, and tell me if indeed she worships Mammon only. Who shall measure the sympathy, skill and intelligence with which she ministers to all who come to her, and lessens the ever-swelling tide of poverty, misery and degradation which every year rolls against her gates from all the nations? When I reflect on all these facts, I cannot but think that, Tolstoi and other theorists to the contrary, it is a splendid thing to be an American. In America the optimist finds abundant reason for confidence in the present and hope for the future, and this hope, this confidence, may well extend over all the great nations of the earth.

If we compare our own time with the past, we find in modern statistics a solid foundation for a confident and buoyant world-optimism. Beneath the doubt, the unrest, the materialism, which surround us still glows and burns at the world's best life a steadfast faith. To hear the pessimist, one would think civilization Had bivouacked in the Middle Ages, and had not had marching orders since. He does not realize that the progress of evolution is not an uninterrupted march.

"Now touching goal, now backward hurl'd, Toils the indomitable world."

I have recently read an address by one whose knowledge it would be presumptuous to challenge. In it I find abundant evidence of progress.

During the past fifty years crime has decreased. True, the records of to-day contain a longer list of crime. But our statistics are more complete and accurate than the statistics of times past. Besides, there are many offenses on the list which half a century ago would not have been thought of as crimes. This shows that the public conscience is more sensitive than it ever was.

Our definition of crime has grown stricter, our punishment of it more lenient and intelligent. The old feeling of revenge has largely disappeared. It is no longer an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The criminal is treated as one who is diseased. He is confined not merely for punishment, but because he is a menace to society. While he is under restraint, he is treated with human care and disciplined so that his mind shall be cured of its disease, and he shall be restored to society able to so his part of its work.

Another sign of awakened and enlightened public conscience is the effort to provide the working-class with better houses. Did it occur to anyone a hundred years ago to think whether the dwellings of the poor were sanitary, convenient or sunny? Do not forget that in the "good old times" cholera and typhus devastated whole counties, and that pestilence walked abroad in the capitals of Europe.

Not only have our laboring-classes better houses and better places to work in; but employers recognize the right of the employed to seek more than the bare wage of existence. In the darkness and turmoil of our modern industrial strifes (sic) we discern but dimly the principles that underlie the struggle. The recognition of the right of all men to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a spirit of conciliation such as Burke dreamed of, the willingness on the part of the strong to make concessions to the weak, the realization that the rights of the employer are bound up in the rights of the employed-in these the optimist beholds the signs of our times.

Another right which State has recognized as belonging to each man is the right to an education. In the enlightened parts of Europe and in America every city, every town, every village, has its school; and it is no longer a class who have access to knowledge, for to the children of the poorest laborer the school-door stands open. From the civilized nations universal education is driving the dull host of illiteracy.

Education broadens to include all men, and deepens to teach all truths. Scholars are no longer confined to Greek, Latin and mathematics, but they also study science converts the dreams of the poet, the theory of the mathematician and the fiction of the economist into ships, hospitals and instruments that enable one skilled hand to perform the work of a thousand. The student of to-day is not asked if he has learned his grammar. Is he a mere grammar machine, a dry catalogue of scientific facts, or has he acquired the qualities of manliness? His supreme lesson is to grapple with great public questions, to keep his mind hospitable to new idea and new views of truth, to restore the finer ideals that are lost sight of in the struggle for wealth and to promote justice between man and man. He learns that there may be substitutes for human labor - horse-power and machinery and books; but "there are no substitutes for common sense, patience, integrity, courage."

Who can doubt the vastness of the achievements of education when one considers how different the conditions of the blind and the deaf is from what it was a century ago? They were then objects of superstitious pity, and shared the lowest beggar's lot. Everybody looked upon their case as hopeless, and this view plunged them deeper in despair. The blind themselves laughed in the face of Hauy when he offered to teach them to read. How pitiable is the cramped sense of imprisonment in circumstances which teaches men to expect no good and to treat any attempt to relieve them as the vagary of a disordered mind! But now, behold the transformation; see how institutions and industrial establishments for the blind have sprung up as if by magic; see how many of the deaf have learned not only to read and write, but to speak; and remember that the faith and patience of Dr. Howe have borne fruit in the efforts that are being made everywhere to educate the deaf-blind and equip them for the struggle. Do you wonder that I am full of hope and lifted up?

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, -the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principal of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think. No loss by flood and lightening, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his tolerance has destroyed.

With wonder and sorrow I go back in thought to the ages of intolerance and bigotry. I see Jesus received with scorn and nailed on the cross. I see his followers hounded and tortured and burned. I am present where the finer spirits that revolt from the superstition of the Middle Ages are accused of impiety and stricken down. I behold the children of Israel reviled and persecuted unto death by those who pretend Christianity with the tongue; I see them driven from land to land, hunted from refuge to refuge, summoned to the felon's place, exposed to the whip, mocked as they utter amid the pain of martyrdom a confession of the faith which they have kept with such splendid constancy. The same bigotry that oppress the Jews falls tiger-like upon Christian nonconformists of purest lives and wipes out the Albigenses and the peaceful Vaudois, "whose bones lie on the mountains cold." I see the clouds part slowly, and I hear a cry of protest against the bigot. The restraining hand of tolerance is laid upon the inquisitor, and the humanist utters a message of peace to the persecuted. Instead of the cry, "Burn the heretic!" men study the human soul with sympathy, and there enters into their hearts a new reverence for that which is unseen.

The idea of brotherhood redawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed; and thinkers of great soul like Lessing challenge the world to say which is more godlike, the hatred and tooth-and-nail grapple of conflicting religions, or sweet accord and mutual helpfulness. Ancient prejudice of man against his brother-man wavers and retreats before the radiance of a more generous sentiment, which will not sacrifice men to forms, or rob them of the comfort and strength they find in their own beliefs. The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations. The optimist rejoices in the affectionate sympathy between Catholic heart and Protestant heart which finds a gratifying expression in the universal respect and warm admiration for Leo XIII on the part of good men the world over. The centenary celebrations of the births of Emerson and Channing are beautiful examples of the tribute which men of all creeds pay to the memory of a pure soul.

Thus in my outlook upon our times I find that I am glad to be a citizen of the world, as I regard my country, I find that to be an American is to be an optimist. I know the unhappy and unrighteous story of what has been done in the Philippines beneath our flag; but I believe that in the accidents of statecraft the best intelligence of the people sometimes fails to express itself. I read in history of Julius Caesar that during the civil wars there were millions of peaceful herdsmen and laborers who worked as long as they could, and fled before the advance of the armies that were led by the few, then waited until the danger was past, and returned to repair damages with patient hands. So the people are patient and honest, while their rulers stumble. I rejoice to see in the world and in this country a new and better patriotism than that which seeks the life of an enemy. It is a patriotism higher than that of the battle-field. It moves thousands to lay down their lives in social service, and every life so laid down brings us a step nearer the time when corn-fields shall no more be fields of battle. So when I heard of the cruel fighting in the Philippines, I did not despair, because I knew that the hearts of our people were not in that fight, and that sometime the hand of the destroyer must be stayed.

Part III The Practice of Optimism

The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. It be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, them it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. One who believes that the pain in the world outweighs the joy, and expresses that unhappy conviction, only adds to the pain. Schopenhauer is an enemy to the race. Even if he earnestly believed that this is the most wretched of possible worlds, he should not promulgate a doctrine which robs men of the incentive to fight with circumstance. If Life gave him ashes for bread, it was his fault. Life is a fair field, and the right will prosper if we stand by our guns.

Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.

Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as if they were privileges? The optimist cannot fall back, cannot falter; for he knows his neighbor will be hindered by his failure to keep in line. He will therefore hold his place fearlessly and remember the duty of silence. Sufficient unto each heart is its own sorrow. He will take the iron claws of circumstance in his hand and use them as tools to break away the obstacle that block his path. He will work as if upon him alone depended the establishment of heaven and earth.

We have seen that the world's philosophers - the Sayers of the Word - were optimists; so also are the men of action and achievement - the Doers of the Word. Dr. Howe found his way to Laura Bridgman's soul because he began with the belief that he could reach it. English jurists had said that the deaf-blind were idiots in the eyes of the law. Behold what the optimist does. He converts a hard legal axiom; he looks behind the dull impassive clay and sees a human soul in bondage, and quietly, resolutely sets about its deliverance. His efforts are victorious. He creates intelligence out of idiocy and proves to the law that the deaf-blind man is a responsible being.

When Hauy offered to teach the blind to read, he was met by a pessimism that laughed at his folly. Had he not believed that the soul of man is mightier than the ignorance that fetters it, had he not been an optimist, he would not have turned the fingers of the blind into new instruments. No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit. St. Bernard was so deeply an optimist that he believed two hundred and fifty enlightened men could illuminate the darkness which overwhelmed the period of the Crusades; and the light of his faith broke like a new day upon western Europe. John Bosco, the benefactor of the poor and the friendless of Italian cities, was another optimist, another prophet who, perceiving a Divine Idea while it was yet afar, proclaimed it to his countrymen. Although they laughed at his vision and called him a madman, yet he worked on patiently, and with the labor of his hands he maintained a home for little street waifs. In the fervor of enthusiasm he predicted the wonderful movement which should result from his work. Even in the days before he had money or patronage, he drew glowing pictures of the splendid system of schools and hospitals which should spread from one end of Italy to the other, and he lived to see the organization of the San Salvador Society, which was the embodiment of his prophetic optimism. When Dr. Seguin declared his opinion that the feeble-minded could be taught, again people laughed, and in their complacent wisdom said he was no better than an idiot himself. But the noble optimist persevered, and by and by the reluctant pessimists saw that he whom they ridiculed had become one of the world's philanthropists. Thus the optimist believes, attempts, achieves. He stands always in the sunlight. Some day the wonderful, the inexpressible, arrives and shines upon him, and he is there to welcome it. His soul meets his own and beats a glad march to every new discovery, every fresh victory over difficulties, every addition to human knowledge and happiness.

We have found that our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of letters have been optimists in their books and in their lives. No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius, and many optimistic writers have been read and admired out of all measure to their talents, simply because they wrote of the sunlit side of life. Dickens, Lamb, Goldsmith, Irving, all the well-beloved and gentle humorists, were optimists. Swift, the pessimist, has never had as many readers as his towering genius should command, and indeed, when he comes down into our century and meets Thackeray, that generous optimist can hardly do him justice. In spite of the latter-day notoriety of the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam, we may set it down as a rule that he who would be heard must be a believer, must have a fundamental optimism in his philosophy. He may bluster and disagree and lament as Carlyle and Ruskin do sometimes; but a basic confidence in the good destiny of life and of the world must underlie his work.

Shakespeare is the prince of optimists. His tragedies are a revelation of moral order. In "Lear" and "Hamlet" there is a looking forward to something better, some one is left at the end of the play to right wrong, restore society and build the state anew. The later plays, "The Tempest" and "Cymbeline," show a beautiful, placid optimism which delights in reconciliations and reunions and which plans for the triumph of external as well as internal good.

If Browning were less difficult to read, he would surely be the dominant poet in this century. I feel the ecstasy with which he exclaims, "Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth this autumn morning!" And how he sets my brain going when he says, because there is imperfection, there must be perfection; completeness must have come out of uncompleteness (sic); failure is an evidence of triumph for the fullness of the days. Yes, discord is, that harmony may be; pain destroys, that health may renew; perhaps I am deaf and blind that others likewise afflicted may see and hear with a more perfect sense! From Browning I learn that there is no lost good, and that makes it easier for me to go at life, right or wrong, do the best I know, and fear not. My heart responds proudly to his exhortation to pay gladly life's debt of pain, darkness and cold. Lift up your burden, it is God's gift, bear it nobly.

The man of letters whose voice is to prevail must be an optimist, and his voice often learns its message from his life. Stevenson's life has become a tradition only ten years after his death; he has taken his place among the heros, the bravest man of letters since Johnson and Lamb. I remember an hour when I was discouraged and ready to falter. For days I had been pegging away at a task which refused to get itself accomplished. In the midst of my perplexity I read an essay of Stevenson which made me feel as if I had been "outing" in the sunshine, instead of losing heart over a difficult task. I tried again with new courage and succeeded almost before I knew it. I have failed many times since; but I have never felt so disheartened as I did before that sturdy preacher gave me my lesson in the "fashion of the smiling face."

Read Schopenhauer and Omar, and you will grow to find the world as hollow as they find it. Read Green's history of England, and the world is peopled with heros. I never knew why Green's history thrilled me with the vigor of romance until I read his biography. Then I learned how his quick imagination transfigured the hard, bare facts of life into new and living dreams. When he and his wife were too poor to have a fire, he would sit before the unlit hearth and pretend that it was ablaze. "Drill your thoughts," he said; "shut out the gloomy and call in the bright. There is more wisdom in shutting one's eyes than your copybook philosophers will allow."

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world. In imagination I leave the country which lifts up the manhood of the poor and I visit India, the underworld of fatalism-where three hundred million human beings, scarcely men, submerged in ignorance and misery, precipitate themselves still deeper into the pit. Why are they thus? Because they have for thousands of years been the victims of their philosophy, which teaches them that men are as grass, and the grass fadeth, and there is no more greenness on the earth. They sit in the shadow and let the circumstances they should master grip them, until they cease to be Men, and are made to dance and salaam like puppets in a play. After a little hour death comes and hurries them off to the grave, and other puppets with other "pasteboard passions and desires" take their place, and the show goes on for centuries.

Go to India and see what sort of civilization is developed when a nation lacks faith in progress and bows to the gods of darkness. Under the influence of Brahminism genius and ambition have been suppressed. There is no one to befriend the poor or to protect the fatherless and the widow. The sick lie untended. The blind know not how to see, nor the deaf to hear, and they are left by the roadside to die. In India it is a sin to teach the blind and the deaf because their affliction is regarded as a punishment for offenses in a previous state of existence. If I had been born in the midst of these fatalistic doctrines, I should still be in darkness, my life a desert-land where no caravan of thought might pass between my spirit and the world beyond.

The Hindoos (sic) believe in endurance, but not in resistance; therefore they have been subdued by strangers. Their history is a repetition of that Babylon. A nation from afar came with speed swiftly, and none stumbled, or slept, or slumbered, but they brought desolation upon the land, and took the stay and the staff from the people, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water, the mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, and none delivered them. Woe, indeed, is the heritage of those who walk sad-thoughted (sic) and downcast through this radiant, soul delighting earth, blind to its beauty and deaf to its music, and of those who call evil good, and good evil, and put darkness for light, and light for darkness.

What care the weather-bronzed sons of the West, feeding the world from the plains of Dakota, for the Oars and the Brahmins? They would say to the Hindoos (sic), "Blot out your philosophy, dead for a thousand years, look with fresh eyes at Reality and Life, put away your Brahmins and your crooked gods, and seek diligently for Vishnu the Preserver."

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope. When our forefathers laid the foundation of the American commonwealths, what nerved them to their task but a vision of a free community? Against the cold, inhospitable sky, across the wilderness white with snow, where lurked the hidden savage, gleamed the bow of promise, toward which they set their faces with the faith that levels mountains, fills up valleys, bridges rivers and carries civilization to the uttermost parts of the earth. Although the pioneers could not build according to the Hebraic ideal they saw, yet they gave the pattern of all that is most enduring in our country today. They brought to the wilderness the thinking mind, the printed book, the deep rooted desire for self-government and the English common law that judges alike the king and the subject, the law on which rests the whole structure of our society.

It is significant that the foundation of the law is optimistic. In Latin countries the court proceeds with a pessimistic bias. The prisoner is held guilty until he is proved innocent. In England and the United States there is an optimistic presumption that the accused is innocent until it is no longer possible to deny his guilt. Under our system, it is said, many criminals are acquitted; but it is surely better so than that many innocent persons should suffer. The pessimist cries, "There is no enduring good in man! The tendency of all things is through perpetual loss to chaos in the end. If there was ever an idea of good in things evil, it was impotent, and the world rushes on to ruin." But behold, the law of the two most sober-minded, practical and law abiding nations on earth assumes the good in man and demands proof of the bad.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. The prophets of the world have been good of heart, or their standards would have stood naked in the field without a defender. Tolstoi's strictures lose power because they are pessimistic. If he had seen clearly the faults of America, and still believed in her capacity to overcome them, our people might have felt the stimulation of his centure (sic). But the world turns its back on a hopeless prophet and listens to Emerson who takes in account the best qualities of the nation and attacks only the vices which no one can defend or deny. It listens to the strong man, Lincoln, who in times of doubt, trouble and need does not falter. He sees success afar, and by strenuous hope, by hoping against hope, inspires a nation. Through the night of despair he says, "All is well," and thousands rest in his confidence. When such a man censures, and points to a fault, the nation obeys, and his words sink into the ears of men; but to the lamentations of the habitual Jeremiah the ear grows dull.

Our newspapers should remember this. The press is the pulpit of the modern world, and on the preachers who fill it much depends. If the protest of the press against unrighteous measures is to avail, then for ninety nine days the word of the preacher should be buoyant and of good cheer, so that on the hundredth day the voice centure (sic) may be a hundred times strong. This was Lincoln's way. He knew the people; he believed in them and rested his faith on the justice and wisdom of the great majority. When in his rough and ready way he said, "You can't fool all the people all the time," he expressed a great principle, the doctrine of faith in human nature.

The prophet is not without honor, save he be a pessimist. The ecstatic prophecies of Isaiah did far more to restore the exiles of Israel to their homes than the lamentations of Jeremiah did to deliver them from the hands of evil-doers.

Even on Christmas Day do men remember that Christ came as a prophet of good? His joyous optimism is like water to feverish lips, and has for its highest expression the eight beatitudes. It is because Christ is an optimist that for ages he has dominated the Western world. For nineteen centuries Christendom had gazed into his shining face and felt that all things work together for good. St. Paul, too, taught the faith which looks beyond the hardest things into the infinite horizon of heaven, where all limitations are lost in the light of perfect understanding. If you are born blind, search the treasures of darkness. They are more precious than the gold of Ophir. They are love and goodness and truth and hope, and their price is above rubies and sapphires.

Jesus utters and Paul proclaims a message of peace and a message of reason, a belief in the Idea, not in things, in love, not in conquest. The optimist is he who sees that men's actions are directed not by squadrons and armies, but by moral power, that the conquests of Alexander and Napoleon are less abiding than Newton's and Galileo's and St. Augustine's silent mastery of the world. Ideas are mightier than fire and sword. Noiselessly they propagate themselves from land to land, and mankind goes out and reaps the rich harvest and thanks God; but the achievements of the warrior are like his canvas city, "to-day a camp, to-morrow all struck and vanished, a few pit-holes and heaps of straw." This was the gospel of Jesus two thousand years ago. Christmas Day is the festival of optimism.

Although there are still great evils which have not been subdued, and the optimist is not blind to them, yet he is full of hope. Despondency has no place in his creed, for he believes in the imperishable righteousness of God and the dignity of man. History records man's triumphant ascent. Each halt in his progress has been but a pause before a mighty leap forward. The time is not out of joint. If indeed some if the temples we worship in have fallen, we have built new ones on the sacred sites loftier and holier than those which have crumbled. If we have lost some of the heroic physical qualities of our ancestors, we have replaced them with a spiritual nobleness that turns aside wrath and binds up the wounds of the vanquished. All the past attainments of man are ours; and more, his day-dreams have become our clear realities. Therein lies our hope and sure faith.

As I stand in the sunshine if a sincere and earnest optimism, my imagination "paints yet more glorious triumphs on the cloud-curtain of the future." Out of the fierce struggle and turmoil of contending systems and powers I see a brighter spiritual era slowly emerge-an era in which there shall be no England, no France, no Germany, no America, no this people or that, but one family, the human race; one law, peace; one need, harmony; one means, labor; one taskmaster, God.

If I should try to say anew the creed of the optimist, I should day something like this: "I believe in God, I believe in man, I believe in the power of the spirit. I believe it is a sacred duty to encourage ourselves and others; to hold the tongue from any unhappy word against God's world, because no man has any right to complain of a universe which God made good, and which thousands of men have striven to keep good. I believe we should so act that we may draw nearer and more near the age when no man shall live at his ease while another suffers." These are the articles of my faith, and there is yet another on which all depends-to bear this faith above every tempest which overfloods (sic) it, and to make it a principal in disaster and through affliction. Optimism is the harmony between man's spirit of God pronouncing His works good.

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The Importance of Optimism to Humanity in Solving Problems

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Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism Research Paper

Introduction, optimism and pessimism defined, impact of expectations on optimism and pessimism, impact of optimism and pessimism on life goals and well-being, threats of optimism and benefits of pessimism.

Attitudes towards life and the world around have a great impact on emotional and psychological state of a person, his/her life goals and well-being. Optimism and pessimism are two important characteristics of an outlook on life and environment shared by every person. Optimistic and pessimistic views of people are influenced by life expectations and life circumstances, childhood experience and social position, etc. The more important a goal is to someone, the greater is its value within the person’s motivation. Without having a goal that matters, people have no reason to act. Optimists and pessimists differ in several ways that have a big impact on their lives.

Traditional definitions of optimism and pessimism rest on people’s expectations for the future. Scientific approaches to these constructs also rest on expectations for the future. This grounding in expectancies links the concepts of optimism and pessimism to a long tradition of expectancy-value models of motivation (Aspinwall & Brunhart 1996) The result of this is that the optimism construct, though having roots in folk wisdom, is also firmly grounded in decades of theory and research on human motives and how they are expressed in behavior. “Dispositional optimism refers to generalized outcome expectancies that good things, rather than bad things, will happen; pessimism refers to the tendency to expect negative outcomes in the future” (MacArthur & MacArthur 1999). Optimists are people who expect good things to happen to them; pessimists are people who expect bad things to happen to them. Selingman (1978) explains that In this regard, the optimistic attributional style is the pattern of external, variable, and specific attributions for failures instead of internal, stable, and global attributes that were the focus in the earlier helplessness model. Implicit in this theory is the importance placed on negative outcomes, and there is a goal-related quality in that optimistic people are attempting to distance themselves from negative outcomes. In hope theory, however, the focus is on reaching desired future positive goal-related outcomes, with explicit emphases on the agency and pathways thoughts about the desired goal. In both theories, the outcome must be of high importance, although this is emphasized more in hope theory (Lesko, 2005).

Expectancies are pivotal in theories of optimism, but there are at least two ways to think about expectancies and how to measure them (Lesko 2005). One approach measures expectancies directly, asking people to indicate the extent to which they believe that their future outcomes will be good or bad. Expectancies that are generalized— expectancies that pertain more or less to the person’s entire life space—are what we mean when we use the terms optimism and pessimism . Another approach to optimism relies on the assumption that people’s expectancies for the future derive from their view of the causes of events in the past (Seligman, 1991 cited Lesko, 2005). If explanations for past failures focus on causes that are stable, the person’s expectancy for the future in the same domain will be for bad outcomes because the cause is seen as relatively permanent and thus likely to remain in force. If attributions for past failures focus on causes that are unstable, then the outlook for the future may be brighter because the cause may no longer be in force. If explanations for past failures are global (apply across aspects of life), the expectancy for the future across many domains will be for bad outcomes because the causal forces are at work everywhere. If the explanations are specific, the outlook for other areas of life may be brighter because the causes do not apply there (Meyers, 2006).

Goals are states or actions that people view as either desirable or undesirable. People try to fit their behaviors, indeed, fit their very selves, to what they see as desirable, and they try to keep away from what they see as undesirable. The second conceptual element in expectancy-value theories is expectancy, a sense of confidence or doubt about the attainability of the goal value (Meyers, 2006). If the person lacks confidence, again there will be no action. That’s why a lack of confidence is sometimes referred to as “crippling doubt.” Doubt can impair effort before the action begins or while it is ongoing. Only if people have enough confidence will they move into action and continue their efforts (Lesko, 2005).

Optimism not only has a positive effect on the psychological well-being of people with medical problems but also influences well-being among caregivers. This conclusion was supported in a project that studied a group of cancer patients and their caregivers. Caregivers’ optimism related to lower symptoms of depression, less impact of caregiving on physical health, and less impact on caregivers’ daily schedules. Similar results have been found in research on caregiver spouses of Alzheimer’s patients (Lesko, 2005). Although much of the evidence for the relationship between optimism and psychological well-being comes from samples encountering serious adversity, less extreme events have been examined in other studies (Aspinwall & Brunhart, 1996). For example, the start of college is a difficult and stressful time, and researchers have examined students making their adjustment to their first semester of college. Optimism, self-esteem, and other variables were assessed when the students first arrived on campus

Theory (Lesko, 2005) suggests that pessimists are less likely to make efforts to ensure their well-being. There is, in fact, evidence that pessimists engage in behaviors that reflect a tendency to give up. Some of these behaviors have adverse consequences for wellbeing. Some even have deadly consequences. “To the extent that generalized expectancies are negative, internal, and global, bad health and mental health consequences will follow, a response style termed “pessimistic explanatory style” (MacArthur & MacArthur, 1999). Various forms of substance abuse can be seen as reflecting a giving-up tendency. Substance abuse in general, and excessive alcohol consumption in particular, often is seen as an escape from problems. If so, it follows that pessimists should be more vulnerable than optimists to engaging in this pattern of maladaptive behavior. A sizable body of evidence indicates that pessimism can lead people into self-defeating patterns. The study by Ammar et al ( 2000) found that: “patients who possess a tendency toward either high pessimism or high emotion-focused coping are at a high health risk emanating from both high distress and a slow rehabilitation process’. The result can be less persistence, more avoidance coping, health-damaging behavior, and potentially even an impulse to escape from life altogether. With no confidence about the future, there may be nothing left to sustain life. Optimism may influence the settings that people choose as well as what they do in these settings. Just as important, settings differ in the degree to which they allow positive characteristics to develop and be deployed (Meyers, 2006).

Several theorists have suggested the possibility that such situations do exist, that optimism may be potentially damaging (Lesko 2005) For example, too much optimism might lead people to ignore a threat until it is too late or might lead people to overestimate their ability to deal with an adverse situation, resulting in poorer coping. The idea that optimists may fail to protect themselves against threats is one way in which optimism might work against a person. Another possibility is that the optimist’s worldview might be more vulnerable than that of a pessimist to the shattering impact of a traumatic event. After all, adversity confirms the pessimist’s worldview. Although the development of positive expectations is an important goal of such therapies, it also is important to recognize that it can be counterproductive to try to substitute an unquestioning optimism for an existing doubt. Sometimes people are pessimistic because they have unrealistically high aspirations for themselves. They demand perfection, hardly ever see it, and develop resulting doubts about their adequacy. This tendency must be countered by establishing realistic goals and identifying which situations must be accepted rather than changed.

Expectations for the future have an important impact on how people respond in times of adversity or challenge. Expectancies influence the way in which people confront these situations, and they influence the success with which people deal with them. We have yet to see clear evidence of a case in which having positive expectations for one’s future is detrimental. Many questions remain unanswered: for example, about the precise mechanism by which optimism influences subjective well-being, and about potential pathways by which optimism may influence physical well-being. But people themselves are optimistic about the future of work in this area, optimistic that research will continue to reveal the paths by which positive thinking works to people’s benefit.

• Ammar, R., Ben-Zur, H., Rappaport, B., Uretzky, B.G. (2000). Coping Strategies, Life Style Changes and Pessimism after Open-Heart Surgery. Health and Social Work , 25 (3), 201.
• Aspinwall, L. G., & Brunhart, S. N. (1996). Distinguishing optimism from denial: Optimistic beliefs predict attention to health threats. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, n/a.
• Lesko, W.A. (2005). Readings in Social Psychology: General, Classic, and Contemporary Selections. Allyn & Bacon; 6th edition.
• MacArthur, J.D., MacArthur, C.T. (1999). Optimism/Pessimism. Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health.
• Meyers, D.G. (2006). Social Psychology . McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages. Allyn & Bacon.
• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism. https://ivypanda.com/essays/optimism-vs-pessimism/

"Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism." IvyPanda , 29 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/optimism-vs-pessimism/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism'. 29 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/optimism-vs-pessimism/.

1. IvyPanda . "Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/optimism-vs-pessimism/.

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IvyPanda . "Life Expectations: Optimism vs. Pessimism." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/optimism-vs-pessimism/.

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Student Essays

Essay on Optimism [ Meaning, Concept & Importance for Students ]

Optimism the feelings that reflect self belief, positive and preservice in face of every challenge. It is the belief of having positive attitude to address the core life challenges. Optimism is essentially important in our daily life as we struggle against multiple life challenges on daily basis. The following Essay on Optimism talks about its meaning and concept, why Optimism is important for students etc. This essay is really helpful for students in school exams.

Essay On Optimism | Meaning, Importance of Optimism in Student Life

Optimism is a mental attitude or disposition characterized by hope and confidence in the future. People who are optimistic believe that good things will happen, and they tend to be happier and more successful than those who are pessimistic.

There are many reasons to be optimistic. First of all, optimism is based on a realistic view of the world. People who are optimistic understand that life is full of ups and downs, but they believe that the good times will eventually outweigh the bad.

Secondly, optimism is a choice. People who are optimistic choose to focus on the positive aspects of their lives, and they refuse to let negative thoughts and experiences bring them down. Finally, optimism is contagious. When we surround ourselves with optimistic people, their positive attitude rubs off on us and makes us feel better about ourselves and our lives.

Importance of Optimism for Students:

Students who are optimistic have a better chance of success than those who are not. People who are optimistic are more likely to take risks and try new things, and they tend to be happier and more successful in life. In addition, optimism is a key ingredient for happiness. Students who are optimistic are more likely to be happy and satisfied with their lives, and they are less likely to experience anxiety and depression.

>>>> Read Also : ” Essay On Positive Attitude in Life “

So, why is optimism so important for students? There are several reasons. First, optimism is a key ingredient for happiness. Studies have shown that happy people are more likely to be successful in life than those who are not. Therefore, it stands to reason that students who are optimistic are more likely to be happy and successful. Secondly, optimism is a choice.

People who are optimistic choose to focus on the positive aspects of their lives, and they refuse to let negative thoughts and experiences bring them down. This positive outlook allows them to take risks and try new things, which leads to greater success in life. Finally, optimism is contagious. When we surround ourselves with optimistic people, their positive attitude rubs off on us and makes us feel better about ourselves and our lives.

>>>> Read Also : ” Paragraph On Happiness In Life”

Conclusion:

Optimism is a valuable emotion because it allows us to see the world in a positive light, even when things are tough. It gives us hope for the future and motivates us to keep going, even when we feel like giving up. Ultimately, optimism makes us happier and more successful people.

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Climate Forward

The doom vs. optimism debate.

How to reconcile two new reports that seem to tell very different stories about the state of climate change.

By David Gelles

Depending on how you look at it, the climate story is one that can inspire genuine optimism or a fair bit of doomerism.

On any given day, there are news stories , academic studies and memes that support two dueling narratives:

The fatalistic view that global warming is out of control.

And the more hopeful, technocratic outlook that, while the challenges are real, the solutions are within reach.

This week brought yet another slew of data that provides an opportunity to hold these two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

There are elements of truth to both perspectives, of course. It’s a disorienting dynamic that we grapple with as reporters covering climate change. Our work involves reporting on the world as it is. Sometimes that means staring down hard facts about the mess we’ve made, and sometimes that means highlighting the real progress that is underway.

Yes, planet-warming emissions are still on the rise, and the effects of climate change are growing worse. And also, yes, renewable energy is coming online at record rates, and there is a huge global effort to deal with an overheating planet.

On Wednesday, a new report highlighted the stunning, record-breaking gains in wind and solar power around the world. A full 30 percent of global electricity was generated by renewables last year, according to Ember , an energy think tank.

On the very same day, however, the latest figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory revealed record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere . This was the largest 12-month increase ever recorded on the so-called Keeling Curve, which has been used to measure the concentration of CO2 since 1958.

To help make sense of this split-screen moment, I turned to Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Leiserowitz, who tracks public perceptions of global warming, is finely attuned to the often jarring work of reconciling conflicting story lines.

“More than one thing can be true at the same time,” he wrote in an email. “We are witnessing astonishing growth in clean energy. Meanwhile, the hourglass of time we have left to limit global warming at ‘safe’ levels is running out.”

‘Take heart in this news’

Gains in clean energy generation is a theme we’ve been tracking for years now.

Solar power has gotten exponentially cheaper over the past decade, thanks largely to low-cost Chinese manufacturing. And in recent years, it has become more affordable to install wind turbines.

The result, according to Ember, was a 23 percent jump in solar power generation last year, and a 10 percent jump in wind generation. Much of the growth came in China. The country accounted for 51 percent of new solar generation and 60 percent of new wind generation.

Global fossil fuel production grew less than 1 percent last year.

“We should take heart in this news,” said Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia state representative who is now senior counsel at Rewiring America, a nonprofit group working to promote clean power. “We now have more evidence that our shift to clean energy sources is the only viable path to healthier, more resilient communities and a safer climate, here and around the globe.”

And it’s not just power generation that is changing for the better. As my colleagues Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich report, giant batteries are beginning to play a meaningful role in keeping the lights on and stabilizing the grid .

But Abrams cautioned that good news about renewables shouldn’t lead to complacency. “We can’t for a moment slow down,” she said. “These twin reports demonstrate the urgency of action to ratchet down reliance on fossil fuels while speeding delivery of investment in clean generation.”

‘We sadly continue to break records’

The Keeling Curve data offers another reminder, as if one were needed, that planet-warming emissions, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, are continuing to transform our planet.

For more than 65 years now, scientific instruments atop volcanoes in Hawaii have monitored how much carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere. The data “reveals a saw-toothed line that ticks continually upward over time,” my colleague Elena Shao wrote in 2022 . “That pattern is considered by many scientists to be the most important evidence that the climate is changing because of human activity.”

This week’s update was a doozy.

Not only did the concentration of CO2 reach an all-time high, but the trend is accelerating: This was the biggest year-over-year jump ever seen. The NOAA report also said CO2 concentration tends to rise quickly toward the end of El Niño cycles like the one we’re currently experiencing.

Which leads us back to the Ember study. The world is making steady progress in ramping up renewables. And that’s a real cause for optimism.

“The notion of a ‘doomer camp’ is overstated,” Leiserowitz said. “The larger majority of Americans reject a fatalistic view of climate change. In fact, the far larger and more important problem is that most Americans are not worried enough.”

5 more things to know

Trump told oil executives they should give him $1 billion in campaign donations because he planned to roll back regulations. Lisa Friedman, Coral Davenport, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman report today about at a meeting between Trump and oil executives and lobbyists at Mar-a-Lago last month that included leaders from Exxon Mobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute. Lawyers and lobbyists working for the U.S. oil industry are also drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Trump, Politico reported . 77 percent of climate scientists believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That’s from a survey of 380 top climate scientists by The Guardian .

Human-driven changes to the planet are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study . Biodiversity loss is the biggest cause, as well as climate change and invasive species.

Torrential rains have caused one of Brazil’s worst floods in modern history, leaving more than 100 dead in the Rio Grande do Sul State. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a $10 billion plan to help the state, which is home to 11 million people and has some towns almost entirely submerged. The floods could cause a spike in food prices, CNN reported , because the state is a major producer of soy, corn and rice.

25 Republican state attorneys general are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to stop the Biden administration’s new coal power plant rules, which require coal-burning plants to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The lawsuit, led by coal-rich West Virginia, argues that the rules contradict a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that curbed the Environmental Protection’s power to cut emissions.

More climate news:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a “climate friendly” label for a Tyson beef brand, but hasn’t shared the data behind the claim despite requests from a watchdog group, Inside Climate News reports .

The Guardian asked scientists about the most powerful climate actions people can take. The answers: Vote for politicians who support strong climate policy, fly less and eat less meat .

The world’s largest direct air capture plant is now live and has started sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in Iceland, Canary Media reports . Read more about the project in David Gelles’ article from March .

Correction: The April 9 newsletter misstated the source of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide is produced mainly from natural and agricultural ecosystems, not from aviation.

Thanks for being a subscriber.

Read past editions of the newsletter here .

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here . Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here . And follow The New York Times on Instagram , Threads , Facebook and TikTok at @nytimes.

Reach us at [email protected] . We read every message, and reply to many!

David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series . More about David Gelles

A writer explores the complexities of her interracial relationship

Nina Sharma contemplates the power of Black and Brown love in her essay collection “The Way You Make Me Feel.”

Shortly after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, The Washington Post ran a news story about interracial families attempting to explain his death to their children. “ A man was unjustly killed here ,” a White father recalls solemnly telling his biracial Black child.

But there was a gap in the coverage: “There are no interracial couples without a white partner” featured in The Post’s article, Nina Sharma observes in her new essay collection, “ The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown .” Drawing variously on personal reflections, pop culture and history, Sharma makes it her project to decenter Whiteness and highlight a love that has long been relegated to the shadows: that of Black and Brown couples.

Sharma, who is Indian American, is married to Quincy Scott Jones, a Black American educator and poet whom she met at a Fourth of July barbecue, as she recollects in the anthology’s title essay. They had, she writes, grown up just one hour from each other: Jones in a majority-Black suburb of New Jersey, Sharma in Edison, N.J., a town that’s now home to one of the largest concentrations of Indian Americans in the country.

In 16 essays spanning 300 pages, Sharma chronicles her relationship and places it in conversation with other Afro-Asian love stories. Among them are that of the Black-Indian couple at the center of Mira Nair’s 1991 film, “Mississippi Masala,” and the story of Vice President Harris’s parents. (Sharma refers to Harris as her “time-traveling daughter” while contemplating having children of her own.)

The sweeping but focused collection demonstrates Sharma’s commitment to exploring Afro-Asian intimacy in all its beauty and complexity. In one essay, she probes Donald Trump’s indictment of racial others and grapples with her immigrant father’s complicated adulation of the former president. Using “Mad Men” as a launchpad, Sharma incisively considers the “nothingness of whiteness”: the luxury White people are accorded to make “something out of nothing,” while Black and Brown stories are always expected to make a statement.

In the book’s standout essay, “Sacrifice,” Sharma meditates on her parents’ suggestion that Quincy shave off his dreadlocks before their wedding. She compares the sanctity of a Hindu head-shaving practice, called mundan, with the violence of shaving the hair of enslaved people. “Head shaving was one of the first acts of enslavement,” Sharma writes, recounting the history of Europeans and slave traders shaving heads as a way of “cutting from enslaved Africans all ties to their place and people, all known markers of identity.”

But Sharma doesn’t simply dismiss the sacrosanct Hindu practice of tonsuring; instead, she treads carefully to highlight its nuances and considers the opposing valences that head-shaving carries in Indian and Black communities. She extends her exploration of hair to Black women’s wigs and weaves, which sometimes source hair from India and China, often selling it to consumers as “true Indian hair.” In the essay’s conclusion, Sharma refuses to comfort readers; instead, she recalls her wedding, when her older sister complimented a Black guest’s hair. “I love your hair,” her sister said. “Well, you should,” the guest replied. “It’s yours.”

As such moments prove, Sharma’s debut is remarkable for its daring, how unafraid it is to eschew rosy visions of racial solidarity. She interrogates the ongoing anti-Blackness of her family, even after her marriage to Quincy, refusing to glaze the collection with the banal optimism that assumes all people of color have joined forces to avenge racism. As a case in point, Sharma reminds us of the complicity of the Palestinian American owner of the corner market outside which George Floyd was murdered, and that of the Hmong American police officer who stood watching.

Sharma brings the same candor to her own life and its unglamorous details: her multiple mental health hospitalizations, her persistent cheating on a college boyfriend, her struggle to quit smoking cigarettes. The prose is lush, if occasionally clichéd, such as when she describes a peck on the lips as an “unbearable lightness” and concludes the book by ruminating on the undefined nature of dividing zero by zero while approaching Exit 0 on a New Jersey highway.

Although that metaphor feels strained, its nod to life’s precarity is apt: “The Way You Make Me Feel” affirms that Black and Brown existence in America comes with no guarantee of collective solidarity, no innate promise of racial equality. The path to justice is uncertain, Sharma reminds us, and we must each work hard — and be bold enough to sacrifice our own comfort — to actualize it.

Meena Venkataramanan writes stories on identity, culture and Asian American communities for The Post.

The Way You Make Me Feel

Love in Black and Brown

By Nina Sharma

Penguin. 323 pp. $27

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