“Most people still don’t understand what has happened in Western culture over the past two centuries. “This pessimism is lying across modern civilization like some enormous fallen tree and somehow we’ve got to get a bulldozer and shift it out of the way,” said the English writer and “the first philosopher of optimism in European history” Colin Wilson.Īccording to Wilson, the roots of the pessimism epidemic go back to the Romantics of the early nineteenth century whose message was that humans could only briefly experience “exquisite happiness,” but it was not meant to be forever and life was supposed to be miserable. Or as someone once aptly described that attitude: “If there’s no solution, then there’s no problem.” Pessimism: A Giant Roadblock Optimism is searching for the yes in every situation and finding it. At every moment, you can decide that you’re in the best situation to handle a given challenge. It’s not an opinion about reality it’s a starting point for dealing with reality.

According to the dictionary, the everyday meaning of optimism is “hopefulness and confidence about the future or the success of something.” But the root of the word comes from Latin ( optimum) and the more precise definition of optimism is “the doctrine that this world is the best of all possible worlds.” And, as we shall see, optimism is a much more rewarding strategy. At the same time we create optimism by focusing on the good.

We create pessimism by our focus on the bad. But it is our choice to accept the rain and look beyond it to the coming sunshine. After the rain there will always be sunshine. That unfounded optimism always infuriated me. “Look,” she’d exclaim, “it’s already clearing up over there!” If it were raining cats and dogs on a Friday afternoon, my dear mother would try to cheer me up by looking out the window and pointing at a random piece of sky. Too much rain would force the game to be canceled, which routinely happened in the fall and winter. Hence, as the week progressed, a striking parallel arose between my mood and darkening skies. Back then, we still played on real grass. In high school, my week revolved around the field hockey game on Saturday. The following excerpt comes from chapter 1, “The Best Way to Live.”

In The Intelligent Optimist’s Guide to Life (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2014), Jurriaan Kamp shows that optimism - intelligent optimism, not a rose-colored-glasses brand of wishful thinking - is good for not only your mind but your body too. But the media’s near-exclusive focus on conflict and disaster means that the progress and everyday acts of brilliance taking place across the globe go unnoticed. The world isn’t coming to an end, contrary to what you may have heard.

Divine optimism philosophy