Optimism

1954:

Are we generally optimistic about the future? Do we have reason to be? I’d say most people see no future. They’re pessimistic and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy - if enough people see the future in that negative way, our collective consciousness will self-destruct. Maybe some of us won’t be around to see it happen.

Is this negative view ‘pessimism’? And if so, is it the reason we don’t care about repairing things properly now? And isn’t that spectacularly selfish of us, as well as bad karma?

No one really wants to be selfish, or be seen to be, since that’s so unattractive. But, on the other hand, most of us seek pleasure in life, above all things. We say, “Why not make hay while the sun shines?” The thought of tightening our belts and imposing personal disciplines isn’t a pleasant idea.

What we’d prefer to do is simply coast along. But the warnings about systems-collapse are everywhere. Our ecosystems, our economy and our ethics are going downhill rapidly. Most of us realise that something must be done. To ignore all the warnings would seem crazy and yet if we waste a lot of energy trying to repair the unrepairable, we figure that it won’t be appreciated by people who come after us. And what’s more, they’ll say we didn’t address our problems because we “didn’t care enough”. And that would be the ultimate put-down.

But how would they ever know what we went through? How would they know why we are no longer optimistic?

         

Every older generation, mostly out of self-pity and guilt, will ask the succeeding generation that. And every new generation will blame the last of being irresponsible. They, in turn, leave the same legacy to the next, and so it goes on, without there being any substantial change in human nature.

And if there’s something one would want to change in our world today, wouldn’t it be ‘human nature’?

         

So, we ‘live now, pay later’, preferring the payment’s made after we’re gone from this world. Could it be this which has brought about our irresponsibility - not caring about a world fifty years hence? If so, then that’s surely the ugliest face of pessimism, and the weight of this cynical outlook on life signifies an inability to see how things could be.

How do I envisage what is going to come about, and does it bear down heavily on me? Is it that I can’t seem to deal with my own personal problems, let alone global problems? Do I ignore the significance of my own obvious shortfalls, simply because they feed my pessimism, preventing me from seeing beyond my own familiar reality?

         

And all of us - is it that we’ve given up? Are we mesmerised by one dead-end thought - that in this day and age, that there’s nothing we can do to stop the violent trends of today’s humans?

If most pessimistic people feel as though they are falling to their doom, is it because we can’t see how anything big is ever going to be fixed? And what’s worse, we don’t know how to stop the mega-destructive people in our society, who do all the big-scale destructive things.

         

Surely, everything changes when we personally protest and stop participating in everything we don’t agree with. And if others can’t yet, then their slowness shouldn’t provide us with an excuse not to get on with our own programme-of-boycotting.