Back-up on Optimism

In my late teens, as I started to develop a sense of what the world was in a greater sense than my immediate concerns, I thought of myself as an unemotional, pessimistic person.  I thought that people were not very bright, easily manipulated, unthinking sheep.  I, of course, was a rational person without those characteristics.  I had evaluated my goals for life, and they were for me to be happy.  I had little concern for others and expected to use other people, not in a deliberately harmful way, but for my own gain.  Basically I expected to be a sociopath, but not one that took pleasure in other people's pain.  I believe these people are far more common than most of us presently think.

Then I got (this seems a terrible verb for this process, but I can't think of a better one) a girlfriend, my first of a surprisingly short list, seven in all in 24 years.  I was interested and excited, but not emotionally attached.  Then I left for the United States of America, but on that last day she cried and cried in obvious pain at my leaving.  It hurt.  The emotional pain of someone else caused me emotional pain, and that changed my world.  I developed empathy and the idea that the feelings of other people were worthwhile.  Moreover, the feelings of people are intimately connected.  How we feel, to a very large extent, depends on how those around us feel.  All along I had known that the most important thing is how we feel.

In my late teens I was neither particularly happy or particularly sad.  I would say that the most powerful emotional state was fear.  Fear of humiliation, fear of violence, fear of authority.  I spent a lot of time alone, in my room or going for long walks, living in my imagination.  As I turned eighteen the darkness appeared.  I started to feel hopeless and sad from time to time.  Romantically sad, in the manner of poets and teenage idols.  In my mid-twenties a long-term girlfriend, a relationship of over four years, left me for another man.  Not through a fault of my own but through alternate interest, novelty, and the fact that he was also a very nice person.  During this period I started to work with the developmentally disabled and the mentally ill.  If you want an education in the acceptance of people, this is an excellent method.

The next few years were spent either very alone, or in a vibrant social group, and with intelligent, beautiful girlfriends scarred by their past.  I was not particularly attached, but content in their presence.  They had good qualities, and bad qualities, and the good qualities made me happy and I accepted the bad qualities.  I helped to make them happy until their self-destruction took over, and I wasn't particularly hurt when that self-destruction included me.  I expected it.  This was the first time I started having moments of transcendent joy, times of pure beauty which I attributed to my study of eastern religion/philosophy.  To a large extent I still think that is true, but something else was starting within me.

I started to have variations in my mood beyond the norm.  I started to have days that I called "fey" where I intensely wanted to feel.  I was driven in a wild way to extreme exercise, public performance, drinking and laughing in a grandiose manner.  I also started getting the feelings of darkness, of real pain, an inexplicable moments of exhaustion.  This fitted in well with my friends at the time, who were wedded to novelty, strangeness, creativity, fun.  I started to play music at this time, which suited me very well.  As I became more extreme in my moods, the people I knew became more sedate, more settled.  Both my dark moments and my wild moments became hard to deal with and those eventually friends abandoned me.  Punching yourself in the darkness is not a way to keep friends.  Keep it secret, keep it safe.  It now seems odd to me that no-one ever asked me if I was alright, or needed some help.

During this time, and over the next decade I was fortunate enough to find new friends, and a woman who became my wife.  But I also was becoming more and more prone to depression, and I started to work in a place in which awful things happened which hurt me quite badly.  However, within that experience I also found people that were just happy.  They truly lived, saw the best in things, and found life to be a wonder.  My bipolar steadily got worse, culminating last year in a truly spectacular range of emotions too great for a person to take.

Why have I written my life story in a post entitled "Back-up on Optimism?"  It is because I want people to understand that I have experienced pessimism.  I have experienced dark times.  I have been treated badly by people, been lonely, been unemployed, been poor.  I have seen political scandals, greed, disregard for life, suicide, hatred, and misery.  But I am an optimist.  I think this is the best time to be alive ever, and it is getting better.  Not only is it getting better, but it is getting better at an astonishing rate, faster and faster.

If there is anything that my writing on this blog has been about, it has been about trying to convince people of this fact.  I want to convince people for two reasons.  I really think this is true, and truth matters.  However, we are all also interconnected in terms of our attitudes, beliefs, and emotional states.  Optimism is a better way to live.  It makes you happier.  This happiness spreads.  This attitude spreads.  But people need to be convinced in the first place to spread this feeling and attitude.  So, here is Peter Diamandis, speaking at a TED conference, about a future of abundance, saying the same things as I have been saying, but from a position of success rather than a position on a couch.