Yesterday, I saw a Tweet about unhealthy people delivering healthy food to other unhealthy people. It concluded that the world is insane.
There isn’t anything necessarily wrong about seeing malfunction and contradiction in something like this, or acknowledging the absurdity of the world when you see this kind of thing often. It may be true enough.
But it’s incomplete, narrow, and one-sided. It’s also easy.
To like or repeat this and similar observations (which I have often done) takes no work whatsoever. I get to keep my brain unchallenged with any deep analysis, and keep my sense of smug superiority. I walk away from the observation not having stretched myself or grown in any way, but with a slightly narrower, less happy experience of the world.
I had one of those moments of realization yesterday when I saw the Tweet. Normally I’d probably just scroll or even click like. It was a little funny and a little true. It confirmed my own tendency to judge those around me and feel I’m the only sane person in the world. A warm in-group is created by all those who rally around the observation.
Such observations and in-groups aren’t all bad. But it just struck me yesterday as too damn easy. When I’m easy on myself, I become less of who I want to be.
I forced myself to reframe the situation described in the Tweet and see it from an optimistic point of view. Total strangers struggling with health are voluntarily helping each other attempt to improve it through the miracle of market exchange.
As soon as I framed it that way, it snapped me into a better mindset. And the process of working to see a more hopeful angle sharpened my mind just a bit.
Just like the original Tweet, nothing about this alternate take was untrue.
Optimism doesn’t require you to pretend things are good when they’re not. It only requires you to push past the laziness of pessimism and find the less easy truths of a situation.