Following are some thoughts I have been ruminating for a while now. This is partly personal experience, partly from books/videos/articles. This might end up trite and mere regurgitation through unnecessary mental gymnastics, but writing this out helps me make sense out of a jumble of thoughts and eventually relieve myself of it so that I can (finally) move on to other brain fodder.

It has never been easier to be a pessimist.

In times like these, when we are living through a pandemic, and we have dangers like climate change and political chaos around the world, optimists are often seen as naive and delusional by the other half, pessimists. Hope looks futile and foolish to a pessimist, maybe because in a crisis, it is difficult to conceive and heavy to carry. When the situation around is objectively bad (higher suffering among people) and logic manifests a bleak picture of the present and the future, pessimism has the advantage of being more close to reality.

Maybe this pessimism is beneficial in a way. I believe that being a rationalist allows us to have a clearer understanding of the world around us. Ideas and beliefs that convolute our understanding of the world are detrimental to our lives as they are likely to lead to bad decisions. In uncertain times, we can be dangerously accepting of such baseless, comforting beliefs. Pessimism can be thought of as the unpleasant but necessary immunization to such things, as it presumes that things are not as good as they seem. While this assumption may not always be true, we are surely rescued from confirmation bias and rational thinking becomes easier. It helps us to be resistant to false beliefs and misinformation that come from around us, and to wishful thinking that comes from within. Rationalism and pessimism can act in sync with each other, saving us from irrational decisions.

Too much of a “bad” thing

However, too much pessimism leads us to a slippery slope into despair. We might develop a reverse bias of cynicism, where we are unaccepting of positive information and hope, since all of it seems too good to be true. This way of thinking rushes to the extreme, assuming the worst in people and situations and leading to less trust, compassion and love. I can vaguely imagine this as an auto-immune disease of the mind, where the immune system attacks the host itself. Take a few more steps down this path and let our mind stray a little and we arrive at nihilism. We can ask the (valid) question- what is all of this suffering for and without any assurance of a positive outcome, what is hope really worth? Since nothing really matters in the face of death and life is so random and unpredictable, surrender of hope and resignation to whatever comes seems like a comfortable option. The question “what’s the point?” puts a stop to everything. We avoid any voluntary suffering and hence a sense of meaning to avoid the inevitable mental suffering that results from sustaining hope. A situation in which one loses agency over one’s own life, like a pandemic, exacerbates this condition. We are forced to live a life that is passive, where we are in the backseat and everything around us seems to carry us into the dark towards some unknown future. It doesn’t take long to realise that this is a highly undesirable state of mind leading to an undesirable way of life.

Saving grace(?)

Even with a pessimistic point of view, one could be selfish and look at life as an act of salvaging the good things while enduring the bad things. The “good things" vary from person to person. It could be a fulfilling career, achieving status and wealth, a contented family life, satisfaction from creative work, helping others, etc. Even logically, it is foolish to throw away a chance at these things, just because the “bad things" seem to outweigh the “good things”.

Here, we can perhaps find some rational basis for hoping. Anything good rarely comes without the active living of life i.e working towards what we want and savouring the process. We can experience momentary pleasures, which is often hurriedly defined as “happiness”, but the things that shape our life and whose pursuit gives us lasting reasons to be happy and content have to be pursued with the wilful acceptance of the risks and hardships that are intertwined with them. And one cannot endure these hardships unless one is hopeful, as hope gives us a reason to keep going after these things in the first place. Hope, I believe, is a tool for sustenance in the present moment and a fuel for these pursuits. Thus, we cannot live, happily atleast, without some (well-reasoned) hope. If not for the world at large, for our own sake, we should try to be optimists to some degree. How to find hope is another question to ponder on.

To be optimally hopeful, we need to try and toe the line between delusional thinking and hopeless resignation, which can be done through rationalism on one hand and the rejection of nihilism on the other.

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