Wowaweewa! Do you have a thread going where you’re telling us about what you’re doing (“ask the…”-type-thing?) If not, would you like to start one? It sounds so interesting!
I’m a skeptical optimist. I do not sit around and think things will work out. I work myself cross-eyed to make it work all the while firmly believing that if I work hard enough and manage to keep everyone else optimistic with my energy it will all work out. People who think every thing you try is doomed are really annoying to work with, plus sometimes you have to do things even if you know there is not going to be a great outcome.
I’ve done ask the aid worker threads before here, mostly when I was in Iraq. To be honest, I don’t really have the energy this time around.
I don’t think cynicism and pessimism are exactly the same thing, just like naivete and optimism are not quite the same. It is possible to be a cynic, but not exactly a pessimist.
Ambrose Bierce’s definition: “CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.”
I think the mentallity of these type of cynics is close to that of conspiracy theorists…they think they can see what others cannot even though it should be “obvious” and derive a certain satisfaction in “knowing” that.
A realist, maybe? My default position is never to assume that someone is lying to me or trying to take advantage of me, but after 45 years of life, I’ve certainly learned that there are any number of people who do indeed do that. I also know that there are tons of nice, honest people in the world. It’s kind of a balancing act between cynicism, realism, and optimism.
But there are things that really can’t, or shouldn’t, be done. If everybody were an optimist about everything, we’d waste a lot of effort on projects that aren’t possible or aren’t helpful.
There really are scams out there. An optimist is more likely to be taken in by a scam than a cynic is.
It would be nice to have less optimism and more cynicism among people who are interested in fighting, say, the War on Drugs. An optimist there would think we really can and should prevent anyone from being able to get drugs. A cynic would be more likely to think that some people are always going to find a way to use drugs, how can we reduce the harm that is done by that drug use?
As a personal example, for years, I had no luck at all with diets. I would try to change everything about how I was eating, and it wouldn’t work, or it would work for a little while, then I’d go right back to my old ways. (This is probably sounding familiar to anyone who has tried and failed to diet) Then I found a diet with what you might call a more cynical approach- accept that there are some things that people do to control their eating that I just can’t or won’t do, and work around them to find other things that I can do. I just can’t keep a food journal, for example. If I try, after a few days I end up not writing in it every day, then not writing in it at all. An optimistic approach might be to keep plugging away at trying to keep a food journal. A more cynical approach is to realize that, for me, keeping a food journal adds extra stress and difficulty to a project (eating less) that is already difficult enough as is. It might be helpful for some people, but for me, it just isn’t. Then I can look for ways to eat less that don’t involve keeping a food journal. (The specific diet I’m on, and have been on for two years now, is the No S Diet, if anyone’s interested)
I’m now trying the same kind of approach to having a cleaner house. I’m not a clean-as-you-go, notice when there’s a mess type. Very much not. I’m quite capable of relaxing in a messy room. Instead of trying to notice when the house gets really messy, I’m trying a chore schedule. I’m trying to gradually add a few small chores that will make the house cleaner, then, when those have become routine, add some more small chores. For example, every Sunday I will go through the junk mail on the kitchen table and do a load of laundry. I’m cynical enough to have given up on ever noticing when things are getting messy, and I’m trying to work around that to actually get the house cleaner. This has been going on for two weeks, which is way too early to really assess how it’s working. But there’s less junk mail on the table and less dirty laundry piled up in the bedroom.
Cynicism can be a good thing in financial planning. An optimist might assume that they are always going to have a job that pays the same as or more than the job they have now, and that the value of any investment they have is always going to go up. Those aren’t safe assumptions for financial planning, as so many people have found out since 2008. A cynic would recognize that people do lose jobs, salaries do go down, and investments, including real estate, do sometimes lose value. The cynics might have come out of the financial crisis better, on average, than the optimists, because they weren’t as optimistic about their career prospects or their investments.
Whether it’s better to be optimistic or cynical probably has the most to do with the actual probability of good or bad things happening. If good things are much more likely to happen than bad, then it’s best to be optimistic. If vice versa, it’s better to be cynical. The trouble is, it’s not always easy to determine the actual probability of good or bad things happening. Sometimes this probability is affected by what you think the outcome will be, but sometimes it isn’t. In cases where it isn’t, being an optimist isn’t going to help. If that situation is also one where bad things are more likely than good to happen, then an optimist might be less prepared to deal with things not going well.
Having been married to a cynic for several years, I can say that it is. It is so tiring to deal with somebody who thinks the worst of every situation and has no optimism in regard to challenges.
I don’t have any real comments on the topic as a whole, but one specific type of cynicism that bugs me on the SDMB is always assigning the basest possible motives to celebrities. Two examples I remember:
(1) In a discussion of why the Star Wars prequels were so bad, someone saying that it was all because George Lucas was motivated purely by money. Which seems to be fairly instantly and patently false, because if he was motivated purely by money there’s no way in hell he would have waited so many years to make the prequels in the first place
(2) After JK Rowling made the comment that she thought Dumbledore was gay, someone said something along the lines of “well, I bet every few months, as soon as her name gets out of the spotlight, she’ll pop back up again with some other piece of news”. I find this particularly ironic given that JK Rowling has been incredibly NON-publicity-seeking, at least on the scale of people as successful as she is. I mean, I’m a huge Harry Potter fan and I’m not even sure I know what she looks like.
Optimists can be tough to deal with, too. It can be frustrating to see you trying, yet again, something that we know from experience is likely to fail. And we’re not supposed to say that to you, it’s being “negative” or “discouraging”. It can be really frustrating (and have consequences well beyond frustration) to have an optimist want to invest shared money in something we think isn’t likely to pay off, or may even be a scam.
My boyfriend calls me a pessimist, I tell him I’m just being realistic. That life sucks and I know that. Unfortunately, I have found that my way of viewing the world is not the best way to live your life. So things that I would once get hung up on don’t matter anymore.
I’ve decided that living my life in ignorance is more beneficial than living in wait for the worst to happen. Some would argue with me, but I’d rather be stupid and happy than smart and unhappy. I guess that this statement shows that I believe that being a cynic is smarter, but I’ve stopped caring.
Are you the kind of pessimist who believes that life sucks unless you do something to prevent it sucking (so you’d better get off your butt and make a good life for yourself); or the kind who believes that life sucks no matter what you do (so there’s no use in even trying)?
You may benefit from reading the book Learned Optimism, which makes the case that—with certain qualifications—optimism, even if it’s somewhat unrealistic, is actually advantageous.
Being a cynic about something, or even just a particular aspect of that something is a whole different kettle of fish than being a cynic about all of that something or a cynic about everything in general.
I try to keep myself as naive as I can and still function in society. Those areas of my life where I have to be more cynical are annoying and painful and I try to avoid them whenever possible.