…Why optimism is annoying

1. Sunny-side up. This is pigheaded stubbornness masquerading as a happy-go-lucky attitude.  It’s insidious because, people who see everything as sunny-side up are often people who don’t like to deal with things in their entirety – they hear what they want to hear, and deal with what they feel like dealing with, just so long as it supports their shiny belief that it’s all good.  Things like circumstance or personal taste do not apply, which is fundamentally irritating because not everyone likes sunny-side up.  Some people think it’s a bit underdone.  Some people prefer the safety of overeasy or the complexity of scrambled or the resolute state of hard-boiled.  Yet these people are less likely to go sprinkling words of happy wisdom like seasoning in the way the sunny-side uppers do.  In fact, they have to tread on eggshells whenever they have what sunny-side uppers call something ‘negative’ to say.  There is more than one valid and constructive way to see the world, so let’s all eat our damn eggs which ever way works best for us.

2. Life is good, the world is good, people are good. Puh-lease.  Life is what you make it, the world is neutral, and people are geared toward survival.  Goodness is a choice – not an automatic state of being – which makes it all the more noble a way to be.  If goodness was automatic and easy, then pop music, artificial flavourings and reality TV would be a lot harder to come by.  And just because life, the world and people are good to you does not mean that all three are good to everyone.  If life, the world and people are good to you, don’t be a naive, insular jackass about it – be grateful.

3. That’s disappointing. Do you expect too much of people/places/things, only to be crushingly disappointed by them, year after year?  There is only one thing to blame here: OPTIMISM.  Optimism is walking through the same doorway over and over again, only to have the same bucket of water fall on you each time – yet hoping and even believing every time that things will be different.  In other words, optimism is a trap for chumps.  Equally, though, pessimism is for chumps too.  Pessimism is expecting that every door is boobytrapped and, hence, not walking through any – and whining incessantly about how crap every doorway is, or how the only good ones are locked.  Think neutral, I say.  Maybe a bucket of slime will fall on your head, maybe you’ll be the millionth customer and win free sh!t – but you won’t know till you walk through that door prepared for anything.