Pessimist and Proud!

Inspiration comes in various forms, but none as weird as mine today I'm sure.

Have any of you noticed that at the top of any blog on blogger, there's an option called next blog? That randomly throws you to some other blog, and this time, after chain-jumping for a while, one of my online activities, I ended up in a Chinese blog about a guy getting some random Chinese word shaved into his head. Yeah. Seriously. I was impressed. and considering I'm posting, I guess inspired too... My parents assure me they never dropped me when I was a baby.. not so sure now.... :P

As most of you know, I'm a third year engineering guy right now, and I'm pretty happy with life in general, mostly because I dont really ask too much from it. I have my aims and my desires and my hopes, but being a born pessimist, I assume that none of them will ever come true. Sure that sounds depressing, but listen to my logic, and I'm sure you'll come around to my way of thinking.

If you're an optimist and always believes the best will happen, then you're bound to be disappointed, because real life never happens perfectly. IF you wish for something you know is a long-shot, then chances are you wont get it. Sure you can quote the stories where the impossible does happen, but they are so few and far between. Thats why they're even remembered, because they're atypical. But on the other hand, if you believe that the worst will always happen, then you can only ever be pleasantly surprised at what does actually happen, because by definition, the "worst" is the worst, and life can only be better. Think about it, it makes sense. I'm standing up for pessimists all over the world as I write this. Too long have we been shunned and marginalized for speaking our views. WE play the role noone wants. The villain, the bad guy. The guy who thinks the plan will fail, the guy who believes that there isn't a "good guy" within us all, while secretly all we want is to be proven wrong. Yup. We want to be proven wrong.

The reason so few people like to be pessimistic is because it takes effort. Any idiot can go around hoping the best will happen, but a pessimist has to think about the worst that ca happen. and then think of how to deal with it. Being pessimistic is really easy, but being a true pessimist, now thats hard. It entails accepting and planning for the worst. You have to be willing to deal with the worst-case scenario if it does arise, and you have to have the self-belief that you can handle it. If not, you're headed to world of despair and depression if you follow the pessimistic path.

I think thats a common misconception, a pessimist doesn't want the world to go up in flames, but he thinks it might, so that he can be pleased when it doesn't. A cynic, on the other hand WANTS it to burn. And all the while, the optimist sits and makes flower-chains and sings weird music.

The pessimist wants the world to be good and wants things to be alright. He wants people to be good and the plan to work, but he'd rather be the brunt of negativity than be disappointed if life doesn't go exactly to plan. In that sense I think the optimist is actually a secret masochist. He wants to be disappointed again and again and again, and after a while he becomes the most useless thing possible- a cynic.

Optimists gone bad make cynics. They hoped for the best, hoped for the utterly impossible. Hoped exams would get cancelled just because they didn't study, hoped their bosses' planes would crash, and such lovely thoughts, which of course never happened, now they've lost faith in the world and spend time sprouting negativity. A true pessimist will never become a cynic Why would he? Life always turns out better than he had hoped for. No time does he feel that the world is out to get him, but rather he always feels that the world has been good to him.

I'm proud to be a pessimist. I truly believe that the worst will happen always, and I always feel overjoyed when it doesn't. Life is hard, yes, but the depth of hardness is relative. I f you set the bar of how hard you think life is going to be high enough, and prepare yourself for that, you'll be surprised at how easy life actually becomes..