As announced in the previous article, we want to take a closer look at the topic of „pessimism“.
Let’s start with a definition of pessimism as it should be understood here: it is a state of mind that makes you feel dissatisfied with the present situation and worried about the future for no apparent reason. In this state, you see the bad in everything. You think that there is injustice everywhere, that rights are not respected, etc.
How do you get into such a state?
The causes of this can be found in ourselves and in the ideas, we have about ourselves and our merits, our heightened expectations of others and the assumption that other people have negative intentions towards us. If we think this way, life cannot satisfy us because we will always suffer. Firstly, because we never get what we think we deserve and secondly, because people never treat us the way we expect them to. This triggers pain and suffering in us and increases the pressure on our psyche.
Let’s take a closer look at these pessimistic ideas: on our worst days, life seems full of adversity as our fate does not shape things in our favor (accident, job loss, being left by a partner, serious illness, etc.). These negative thoughts often arise from unpleasant events or emotional problems and can make our lives miserable. In extreme cases, this leads to social exclusion: because we see the bad everywhere and criticize everything, we distance ourselves from everything. We can no longer stand our supposedly bad environment, in turn, other people instinctively avoid us. Who wants to spend time with someone like that? The flood of negative thoughts can gradually become a habit that takes hold of our entire personality and makes us see everything in a dark light until we ourselves are completely dark.
In its most extreme form, this negative view can border on paranoia. This is the case when someone systematically criticizes everything and believes that there is some sort of conspiracy against them, of which they are a victim. They withdraw more and more into a non-real world that is shaped by their subjective perspective and in which every behavior of others represents new proof of their evilness in their eyes. Typical of this state is that one becomes more and more egocentric and relates everything to oneself and constantly thinks that one must defend one’s rights without giving a thought to whether one is entitled to these assumed rights at all or whether the exercise of these rights in the given context is in accordance with ethical principles. If, for example, a situation, a gesture or a statement refers directly to us, we perceive it as hostility; if it does not refer to us, we feel excluded. So, it’s always just about us. We tend to see the world exclusively from our own perspective and find it difficult to empathize with other people.
In some cases, paranoia can also develop into a kind of arrogance: If we focus only on the bad everywhere because we assume that we can accurately perceive people’s malice, hypocrisy and shabbiness, we gradually come to believe that only we have a superior moral judgment that others do not have, and we thus define our morality as the norm. We can even go so far as to see our perceived misfortune as a sign of choosiness – as if fate has all kinds of badness in store especially for us – which confirms our superiority. We consider ourselves to be the „only pure one among all the stained ones“.
In this day and age social media can also play a role in increasing paranoia. With an unconstrained consumption of social media, it is all too easy to develop a completely distorted view of reality, as you often only communicate with supposedly like-minded people who have an equally negative view – other points of view no longer exist, as the algorithms used in social media filter them out. This means you can be drawn deeper and deeper into a surreal world of conspiracy theories, the so-called „rabbit hole“. Read more about this in our article „The 7 digital deadly sins„.
These examples show that, first and foremost, a negative view massively distorts the quality of our perception of the world, values, events and people. Once our perception is so massively distorted, we will have to adjust our entire view from the ground up. And as we have already shown in the previous article, this can be brought back into balance by reprogramming our own perception, which requires a lot of patience and willpower. You must go from being a „bad-seer“ to a „good-seer“. „Seeing well“ does not mean seeing life through „pink-colored glasses“. Rather, seeing well is the result of a learning process, a better understanding of the motives and driving forces behind our actions and the actions of the people around us. It is therefore neither about blind optimism („the whole world is beautiful; the whole world is nice“) nor about a state of apathy or indifference towards everything. On the contrary, it is important to look behind the events, to delve deeper into the underlying mechanisms and to adapt our actions accordingly in order to achieve a state of good or correct vision.
Preview: Before we get to „seeing well“ or „seeing correctly“ in this series of articles, we first want to take a closer look at recognizing the symptoms of „poor vision“ in the next article. Without precise diagnosis of the symptoms, therapy will not be promising.
Authors: The Ethica Rationalis editorial team
