Count your blessings
This is a strategy (or a life pro tip, if you will) that served me incredibly well over the past years.
Now, if you don’t know me: I am an optimist. By choice!
That does not always come easy. But it is the best choice I have.
And mind you, it’s not about toxic positivity at all.
I suspect it is much more like learned optimism instead, if you know Martin Seligman. But I haven’t read his books yet, so I can’t be quite sure about that.
Anyhow, here’s why I’m writing this short post today.
Last article was about moral luck, and it left me kind of bittersweet.
Partly because, as much as I love writing, sometimes it’s just difficult to me. I have an old and long lasting tendency to perfectionism, and a loud inner critic.
But also, admittedly I wasn’t in my best mood.
Thinking about moral luck forced me to confront with many critical aspect of my life and my nature, which actually meant 2 things:
- I produced so many examples and sentences that I had to leave out.
- I had to do the hard emotional job of looking inside myself – honestly.
Let’s address number 1 first.
Murdering your darlings is already hard enough. But even worse, I was left with the feeling I couldn’t express everything I really meant to.
Now that I look back on it, I think I did in fact make the point I wanted to. And reducing word count remains one of the most effective editing techniques.
As for number 2: I had to juggle between two opposite feelings.
On the one hand, I was struggling. I needed to vent. And that’s fine: we can’t always be at our best. Accepting hard emotions is better than ignoring them.
On the other hand, I came to hate and even fear whining. I don’t want to feed negative energy, neither for myself nor for anyone else.
It’s not (just) that I don’t want to be a downer. If something bad has to be said, so be it. But complaining for the sake of complaining doesn’t really help.
And here’s the thing: before becoming an optimist, I have been stuck in the victim mentality. I know it didn’t do much good to me.
Yes, maybe I felt special. So terribly unlucky. Poor thing, poor little me.
But now I know there’s a huge power in taking responsibility for how I feel.
Anyhow, just to close the loop.
Reading my post about moral luck now, after three weeks, it seems to me I’ve done a decent job at not being neither too gloomy nor too happy-go-lucky.
The fact I’m “afraid” of whining and falling back to the victim mentality may mean I resist to acknowledge something that is objectively hard and unfair.
On the other end of the spectrum, though, there is the toxic positivity mindset. Which is not any better, and it’s also something I want to steer clear of.
I didn’t want to spread negativity, but I knew there was some still left inside me and I was left with the feeling it might have slipped through the cracks.
Cutting down words did the job, but I wouldn’t know that: I didn’t even want to read the article again after all the mental and emotional effort I had put into it.
I just needed some distance. That, and then I was also quite busy. But today I woke up a couple of hours earlier than usual, so I could write at last.
And what I want to write is just this: count your blessings.
If you’re reading this, you’re already somewhat lucky: you could have been born in a place with no internet, no schools, no roof over your head – just bombs.
[…]
I’d love to live in a society that doesn’t punish us for being authentic. Where we can be ourselves without having to face needless psychological suffering.
But as much as I may wish for this or that, reality is just what it is.
And it is full of people who made the best with what they had.
Yes, we all face hard times. Life can be tough. It is okay to vent.
On the other hand, though, please learn to be an optimist. I promise it’s worth it.