Optimism Is Not For Wimps

Often when writing a series of these blog posts a certain word or concept keeps coming up even though the posts are on different subjects. The latest word to keeps crossing my computer screen is optimism. Looking over some older posts found Larry Brilliant who argued for optimism.

I have found another source of optimism via gapingvoid. I enjoy the gapingvoid cartoons featured on this webblog, but have to label its creator Hugh MacLeod the world's most optimistic curmudgeon. Personally, as a philosophy, I think it works.

It was gapingvoid that gave me Creativity Original and So-So and led me to ChangeThis: The link is to the most talked about of their manifestos. Below is taken from the about page. Again that word - optimism

"Are you an optimist?

Sometimes it seems as though our disagreements—over everything from politics to business to the designated hitter rule—are more serious and more divisive than ever before.

People are making emotional, knee-jerk decisions, then standing by them, sometimes fighting to the death to defend their position.

And yet, we’re optimists.

People call the team at Change This optimists because we don’t believe it has to be this way. We don’t believe humans evolved to be so bad at making decisions, so poor at changing our minds, so violent in arguing our point of view. We’re well aware of how split our country and our world have become, but we don’t think the current state of affairs is built into our very nature."