Half Empty/Full

15. A pessimist is one who has been compelled to live with an optimist.- Elbert Hubbard

People often call me a pessimist, which confuses me. I always try and correct them and tell these people that I'm a realist, which as I understand, most pessimists do. But the thing is, I'm not a pessimist, I'm simply too analytical to be an optimist. I don't think everything will become worse, that everything I try will fail, nor do I think life is generally miserable. I simply don't blindly assume everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows.

Optimists are strange people to me, they confuse me. I just can't ration how it pays to be that way all the time without getting bit in the ass for it. To be so unendingly positive that you outright refuse to allow yourself to see the negatives. People who don't allow themselves to complain, to bitch, to just generally feel something negative. But here's the thing, they don't just ignore the negative, they blindly accept it as well. Looking on the bright side means putting up with the bad, and it's in this vain that people can start to become pessimistic around optimists.

The man who refuses to look at the negative, at all, forces someone else to. There's a problem, obviously, but the optimist is just going to try and find the goodness in it. But that doesn't fix the problem, it's just brushing it under the rug, someone has to go and say it's there under that rug. This person, now acknowledging the problem, is unwittingly focused solely on it, simply because the optimist refuses to see it at all.

I'm going to make a bold proclamation. There is no advancement with optimists, nobody who looks at only the bright side will try and fix something. No optimist neanderthal ever had a problem with the hunter gatherer method of life, they just said "at least we're getting good exercise!" It was the pessimist, the guy who was annoyed at following elk for thousands of miles, and hoping the fruit picked from a random tree wouldn't be poisoned, that decided one day to capture an animal and plant a tree. He that day invented farming and livestock, he was the one who would allow humans to settle in one place.

And he did it cause he focused on what sucked.