![]() I have learned that it is not always easy to know if you are a pessimist, and that far more people than realize it are living in this shadow.Ī pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted as to be permanent. I have seen that, in tests of hundreds of thousands of people, a surprisingly large number will be found to be deep-dyed pessimists and another large portion will have serious, debilitating tendencies towards pessimism. ![]() ![]() Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. He then defines optimism and pessimism, pointing out the challenge to self-identify as either, and offers a heartening, heavily researched reassurance: For the ‘Meaningful Life,’ you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self. For the ‘Engaged Life,’ you identify your highest strengths and talents and recraft your life to use them as much as you can in work, love, friendship, parenting, and leisure. For the ‘Pleasant Life,’ you aim to have as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion. ‘Happiness’ is a scientifically unwieldy notion, but there are three different forms of it if you can pursue. Seligman begins by identifying the three types of happiness of which our favorite psychology grab-bag term is composed: Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life ( public library), one of these 7 must-read books on optimism, was originally published 20 years ago and remains an indispensable tool for learning the cognitive skills that decades of research have shown to be essential to well-being - an unlearning those that hold us back from authentic happiness. Martin Seligman, father of the Positive Psychology movement, who was once elected President of the American Psychological Association by the largest vote in the organization’s history and under whom I studied in my college days. Last week, Oliver Burkeman’s provocatively titled new book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, prompted me to revisit an old favorite by Dr. “The illiterate of the 21st century,” Alvin Toffler famously said, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Our outlook on the world and our daily choices of disposition and behavior are in many ways learned patterns to which Toffler’s insight applies with all the greater urgency - the capacity to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” emotional behaviors and psychological patterns is, indeed, a form of existential literacy.
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