I'm a pessimist. I have always been a pessimist. I'm the sort of pessimist that looks at a glass and unequivocally states "Half Empty!" and then proceeds to look for a leak on the bottom. Optimists annoy me. Pessimists are always annoyed by optimism. It's the same sort of annoyance a super model must feel when watching portly people eat whatever they want, or a liberal feels when Dick Cheney is about to open his mouth to say something. It's the annoyance of witnessing something that discredits the very core of your id; it makes you cringe.
My brother is an optimist and I've spent some time thinking about how two genetically similar people could be so opposite in this sense. The obvious and well-established answer is "perception". It boils down to a matter of a positive or negative perception of one's very existence. I wondered why, and this is what I concluded: I'm a pessimist because I perceive my memories as things I have lost, not as things that I have and carry with me always. A happy memory is not something I have and treasure, it is the shadow of what I have lost. And so all optimism is tainted by the fact that what is positive today will be lost into a memory in the future.
Becoming an optimist would be as simple as realizing that memories are treasured positions and not mournful reminders of what has been lost. I started working on that realization, but then Dick Cheney came on TV... said something... I got annoyed... anyway, I'll do it tomorrow. Oh, did I mention I'm also a procrastinator?
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