Optimists vs. Pessimists- What You Take For Granted and How It Affects Your Thinking

I've still been thinking about the whole optimists and pessimists thing since writing Optimists vs. Pessimists a few months ago. There's a lot of ground I didn't cover.

And bear with me here. I'm not pretending to know everything there is to know about this topic. I've never claimed to know everything there is to know about any topic. Heck, I've never even claimed to know much about any topic. A lot of what I've learned in my life has been gleaned through careful observation and inner analysis. This topic is no different.

With that out of the way, now I can talk.

I've talked about what optimists and pessimists are at the core, but I think I left out something very important. There was an interesting aspect of the topic that I hadn't thought of before. And that is what we take for granted.

What you think about, or rather what you don't bother to think about affects your thinking. The things you consider to always be constant and steady are the rock on which you build your mindset.

And again, like I said in the first post, the things we take for granted might not line up the way you expect. Pessimists, for example, are the ones who take good things for granted.

Now, I'm not saying this in a negative way. When I say that they take good things for granted, I mean that they know the good things are there, but just don't think about them constantly. They consider good things to be something that they can rely on to just be there, so they don't look for them at the forefront of their minds.

On the other hand, optimists take bad things for granted. They know the bad things exist, that bad things are there constantly, and they keep moving from there.

Wording it this way might make it sound like pessimists are somehow in the wrong. They're not. That's the plain black and white of it. No one is wrong in how they cope with situations. Taking it too far is the problem. Thinking that everything is bad when things are really all right or everything is fine when it's all falling apart is no way to live, and if you're living like that, you need to reevaluate your mindset.

When I say that pessimists take the good things that they see for granted, I'm saying that they're coming from a place where they already know that things are inherently good. The reasoning behind the more 'negative' thinking is just that they're just trying to keep themselves 'realistic'. They don't want to be hurt by thinking everything is made of rainbows, and that's why they tend to think that optimists are in the wrong. They see the optimists saying out loud how everything is so good, and they get worried that the optimists are going to hurt themselves.

Likewise, the optimists(like me), come from a place where they already know that everything isn't great. But if they do like the pessimists do, they'll sink into the dark pit of despair. That's where all the happiness comes from. If they don't keep trying to find things that are good in the world, they'll get very lost. And likewise, if they think the pessimists are wrong in their mindset, it's again because they're assuming that everyone thinks the same. They're worried that the pessimists are going to hurt themselves by thinking the way that they do.



But what neither of the groups realizes is that everyone's really going to be okay. You can see the optimist coming out in me here, but it's true. Everyone in this world is keeping up just as well as they can, and if they're not really hurting themselves by doing what they do, I think all of us will be all right.

Like I said last time:


Don't worry about it.


Just be.